History of Psych – Ch 4 – Flashcards
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In his early work when he was his own experimental subject, the 29-year-old Wilhelm Wundt found that he could
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not pay attention to two things at once.
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For Wundt, the subject matter of psychology was
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consciousness.
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Introspection as used by Wundt is also called
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internal perception.
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According to Wundt, there were two elementary forms of experience, namely
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sensation and feelings.
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The Gestalt psychologists' best-known tenet is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This same tenet was alleged in Wundt's principle of
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apperception.
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Wundtian psychology in Germany was slow to develop because
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it was not seen as having practical value.
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Ebbinghaus is important for the history of psychology because he
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successfully challenged Wundt's claim that higher mental processes, such as learning and memory, could not be studied in the laboratory.
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Ebbinghaus's focus of study was on the
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initial formation of associations.
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Ebbinghaus measured learning by
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counting the number of repetitions needed for one perfect reproduction of the material.
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Ebbinghaus' curve of forgetting shows that
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material is forgotten rapidly in the first hours after learning and then the forgetting slows down.
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Apperception
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The process by which mental elements are organized.
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Imageless thought
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Ku?lpe's idea that meaning in thought can occur without any sensory or imaginal component.
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Introspection
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Examination of one's own mind to inspect and report on personal thoughts or feelings.
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Mediate and immediate experience
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Mediate experience provides information about something other than the elements of that experience; immediate experience is unbiased by interpretation.
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Nonsense syllables
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Syllables presented in a meaningless series to study memory processes.
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Phenomenology
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an approach to knowledge based on an unbiased description of immediate experience as it occurs, not analyzed or reduced to elements. (Stumpf)
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Systematic experimental introspection
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Kulpe's introspective method that used retrospective reports of subjects' cognitive processes after they had completed an experimental task.
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Tridimensional theory of feelings
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Wundt's explanation for feeling states based on three dimensions: pleasure/displeasure, tension/relaxation, and excitement/depression.
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Voluntarism
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The idea that the mind has the capacity to organize mental contents into higher-level thought processes.
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In 1867, Wundt offered the first course ever given in ________.
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physiological psychology
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Wundt's productivity as a writer can be quantified by his output, which averaged ________.
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2.2 pages a day for over 50 years
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Wundt's observers used introspection to report ________.
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judgments about the size and intensity of physical stimuli
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Wundt's doctrine of apperception refers to ________.
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the process of organizing mental elements into a whole
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While Wundt had argued that learning and memory could not be studied experimentally, who soon proved him wrong?
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Ebbinghaus
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Other than Stumpf's research, his greatest influence on psychology may have been ________.
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educating the founders of Gestalt psychology
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Systematic experimental introspection involves ________.
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retrospection and the performance of a complex task
