people

Question 1

Wundt

Answer 1

• ‘father of psychology’
• believed in reductionism, that consciousness could be broken down into its basic elements without sacrificing any of the properties of the whole.
• wrote textbooks and set up labs etc fo research
• he did his research in carefully controlled conditions (experimental conditions) meaning his work was all reliable
• Skinner argues that introspection results are subjective and cannot be verified
• although the only contribution he made was to show that psychology could be an experimental science - his methods of introspection did not remain fundamental past 1920

Question 2

Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)

Answer 2

• inspired by feschner
• researched the basics of memory by using the lists of random words (eg. VGL) to avoid the meaning behind any words.
• specifically interested in how memories were formed
• his theory was that humans start losing memories over time… unless its consciously reviewed over and over.
• ebbinghaus forgetting curve
• saw it as natural science rather than philosophy
• Wundt thought that you could not do this as there is no such thing as a word with no meaning
• his theory now - known as ‘encoding’
• most known for work on long term learning and retention

Question 3

William James (1842-1910)

Answer 3

• functionalist - interested in the function of consciousness
• distinguished primary memory from secondary memory
• greatly advanced the movement of pragmatism in philosophy. (approach that evaluates theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application)
• felt that Wundt and Titchenerwas too reductionist, instead he said that consciousness flowed as a stream rather than discern units.
• link with blank slate (LOCKE)? - believed experiences shape us
• James-lange theory of emotion is that body changes come before and form emotional changes e.g. you’re happy when you smile. Criticised saying it does not explain emotion without any arousal.
• proposed that there are a set of basic emotions and that each of these emotions has its own associated physical state.
• try to remember: “an object of primary memory is not thus brought back; it was never lost; its date was never cut off in consciousness from that of the immediately present moment. In fact it comes to us as belonging to the rearward portion of the present space of time, and not to the genuine past.”

Question 4

georg muller

Answer 4

• replicated ebbinghaus’ experiment but included qualitative element by asking participants what they were thinking. - interested in their subjective experience
• found that they did assign meaning still to the words In order to remember and create associations
• explored why we forget memories
• created different conditions
• mullers memory drum, he used this to present the nonsense syllables to participants
• created first concept of interference by using list list test vs list gap test
• magical number 7 (plus or minus)

Question 5

Carl stumpf

Answer 5

• explored music, this work shows that perception is sensory and explored

Question 6

titchener

Answer 6

believed all thoughts could be broken down into basic elements, specifically sensations
- when you identify an object you put together memories of sensations from your past (e.g. shape colour texture etc)

Question 7

Barltlett (1932)

Answer 7

researched remembering (‘remembering book)

• he used real stimuli (not nonsense variables)
• environment we’re in impacts processes (impacts mental schema)
• heavily criticised Ebbinghuas - list of random words still creates association, in order to di this u must train the brain to become automatic
• Bartlett used realistic materials like stories and drawings etc (interested in cultural differences)
• WAR OF THE GHOSTS:
• read participant a story and asked them to repeat it after 15 minutes
• results were mostly as follows
• summarisation theory, went through first and summarised the story
• people remember things that have no importance to the story
• tends to change the odd things in story to things that are more familiar
• created imaginary info
• borrowed a term from neurology called a schemer, invented to capture the way we know where different parts of our body are (e.g. know where our hand is even though we are not looking at it) because we have a schemer in our head
• Bartlett argued we have schemers in our body’s that made assumptions about the world and we used these in order to understand new things.
• idea of the schemer was criticised cos it was too vague

Question 8

Broadbent (1958)

Answer 8

• Filter model
• selection into a limited capacity
• Senes -> VERY short term store -> selective filter -> limited capacity channel
• Put against Atkinson and Shiffrin model multi-store memory model