Chapter 4 Wundt s Psychology was experimental Quantitative objective Hermann Ebbinghaus First psychologist to study higher mental processes Learning and memory Ebbinghaus began his study with initial formation of the associations He proved wrong Wundt s beliefs that learning and memory could not be studied experimentally He used himself as the only subject He studied memory by counting the number of trials or repetitions required to learn the material He devised similar but not identical lists of syllables He repeated the task often enough to be confident of the accuracy of his results Always learned the material at the same time each day Nonsense syllables Syllables presented in a meaningless series to study memory processes They weren t necessarily nonsense they were mostly meaningless He wanted to do his research with words that haven t yet been associated He memorized stanzas of Byron s poem Each stanza had 80 syllables he found that it required approximately nine readings to memorize one stanza He memorized 80 meaningless syllables and discovered that meaningless or unassociated material required nearly 80 repetitions Meaningless or unassociated material is nine times harder to learn than meaningful material Forgetting curve shows that material is forgotten rapidly in the first few hours after learning and more slowly thereafter 20 min 100 60 60 9 hours 40 1 day less than the 40 2 day like a 30 Franz Brentano His book Psychology from an empirical standpoint opposed Wundt s views Freud took 5 courses with Brentano and referred to him as genius Important early psychologists He is an intellectual precursor of Gestalt psychology and Humanistic Psychology schools His psychology was empirical According to him psychology should first focus in observation not experimentation although he did not totally reject the experimental method The study of mental acts Opposed Wundt s ideas that psychology should study the content of conscious experience The subject matter of psychology is mental activity Such as the mental action of seeing rather than the mental content of what a person sees Act psychology experience as a structure or content and experience as an activity Experiencing redness of a flower is the true subject matter of psychology Color is a physical quality but the act of seeing the color is a mental quality or activity Through memory and imagination Brentano s position attracted but Wundt was prominent Carl Stumpf Oswald K lpe Primary data of psychology are phenomena Phenomenology kind of introspection stumpf favored refers to the examination of unbiased experience Experiences just as it occurs Reducing experience to mental contents or elements is to make the experience artificial and abstract and no longer natural Initially follower of Wundt Then Wundt s rival Systematic experimental introspection What s going on in a subjects mind during a conscious experience And after they had completed and experimental task with researchers asking them questions on detail Imageless Thought Thought can occur with any sensory or imaginal content Non sensory aspect of consciousness Chapter 5 Structuralism Edward Bradford Titchener Titchener experimentalists no women allowed Women were considered too pure to smoke He encouraged and supported women s advancement in psychology He accepted women in his graduate program at Cornell while Columbia and Harvard refused them admission Margaret Floy Washburn First woman to obtain a doctoral degree He said all human knowledge is derived from human experience Experience is dependent on the experiencing individuals Proposed the idea of stimuli error Which means confusing the mental process with the object we are observing Apple mediate experience Red shiny shape immediate experience Because we are observing the object not interpreting it Table stimilu error Introspection Qualitative subjective reports He emphasized the parts and WUNDT emphasized the whole The elements of consciousness 1 Reduce conscious processes to their simplest components 2 Determine laws by which these elements of consciousness were associated 3 Connect the elements with their physiological conditions Sensations images and affective states He questioned himself about structural psychology Examining experience as It occurs instead of breaking it down into elements Auguste comte attacked the introspective method Now elements are viewed as a whole not as titchener thought Structuralism contributed with the definition of introspection because nowadays psychology tests and cognitive psychology use introspection in some way Major opponent Gestalt psychology Chapter 6 FUNCTIONALISM Scientist captivated by childlike jenny 1830 Orangutan an ape Charles Darwin Was impressed with jenny the orangutan and said that we must be created from animals His notion of evolution changed the focus of the new psychology from the structure of consciousness to its functions Functionalism is concerned by how the mind functions or how it is used by an organism to adapt to its environment What do mental processes accomplish Functionalism was a deliberate protest against Wundt s experimental psychology and Titchener structural psychology Darwin s pioneering book about evolution On the origin of the species Galton measured individual differences The evolution revolution Charles Darwin Survival of the fittest Only the most forceful cunning and adaptable will survive Thomas Henry Huxley He was always delighted to do battle with the enemies of science and now with the enemies of evolution He was a powerful charismatic speaker He defended Darwin and evolution Debate with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce Robert Fitzroy captain of the HMS beagle Darwin went on a sailing voyage with him and obtained important data to support this theory of evolution Fitzroy believed in God but he suicide after reading Darwin s book Francis Galton 1822 Worked on mental inheritance and individual differences in human capacities He wrote hereditary genius Demonstrating that the greatness or genius occurred within families far too often to be explained solely by environmental influences He founded the science of eugenics Hereditarily endowed with noble qualities He developed his methods to quantify data Adolph Quetelet was the first to use statistical methods and the normal curve of distribution In 1888 he proposed a first report that he called correlations Galton originated the concept of mental tests Intelligence could be measured in terms of a