Early German Psychologists

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Early German Psychologists
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Early Anticipation of Wundt

• Johann Kruger 1756
• An Attempt at an Experimental Psychology
• An anticipation because it was lost or ignored
  until 1950s
• Appears to be more similar to modern psychology
  that Wundts psychology

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Psychophysics

• An attempt to understand the relationship between
  the physical world and the psychological world
• Measured mental events and compared them to the
  measurement of physical events show that they
  covary
• Changing the value of a physical event in some
  way will systematically change the value of the
  psychological event
• Two important contributors to psychology
• Ernst Weber
• Gustav Fechner

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Ernst Weber

• Two-point threshold
• Weight discrimination just noticeable
  difference (JND)
• Webers Law 1st quantitative law in psychology
  and 1st statement of a systematic relationship
  between physical stimulus and psychological
  experience

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Gustav Fechner

• Built upon the ideas of Weber
• Developed 3 important research methods
• Method of limits
• Method of constant stimuli
• Method of adjustment

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Fechner (cont.)

• Developed the term psychophysics
• Monism the mental and physical are simply 2
  aspects of the same reality not separate
  entities
• Elementes (1860) identified as the beginning of
  experimental psychology by some historians
• Mental processes could be quantified (measured)
• Mental events could be examined using the
  precision of scientific methods

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Hermann Ebbinghaus

• Philosopher who spent time teaching and traveling
• Read Fechners Elemente and converted to the
  study of psychology
• His goal was to study higher mental processes
  using methods similar to psychophysics
• 1st person to systematically study memory

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Ebbinghaus Methods

• Highly original he had no one to learn from
• Best known for his use and invention of nonsense
  syllables to study memory unaffected by previous
  learning

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Areas of Research

• 1. What is the relationship between amount of
  material to be remembered and time needed to
  learn it
• Measured increases in number of repetitions to
  master list of nonsense syllables of different
  lengths
• 2. What is the relationship to the amount of
  learning and the amount remembered?
• Used a relearning paradigm
• Formed 7 lists of 16 nonsense syllables, repeated
  them 0, 8 ,16 . . . 64 times. 24 hours later
  measured of repetitions to relearn each list
  discovered over learning

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Other Areas of Interest

• What is the relationship between the passage of
  time and loss from memory?
• Relearned lists 0, 20, 60 minutes . . . 31 days
  after learning. Amount of savings measured
  comparison of repetitions to learn and to relearn
  lists
• Less known but verified by much later research
• Distributed learning better than mass learning
• Active learning better than passive learning
• Meaningful material easier to learn that
  meaningless
• Information learned before sleeping better
  remembered than material learned at other times

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Later Criticisms of Ebbinghaus

• Experiments lacked ecological validity use of
  nonsense syllables instead of real words
• Use of a single subject himself
• However, most of his findings are still accurate
  today

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Ebbinghaus as a Foundation for Binet

• He developed analogy tests and completion tests
  to test children
• Analogy example
• July is to May as Saturday is to .
• Completion example
• Big things are heavier than .
• Childs answer timed and evaluated for
  appropriateness
• Similar items used by Binet in his intelligence
  tests

13
Franz Brentano

• Important but not well known
• Dominican priest who left the church because of
  his inability to accept the infallibility of the
  pope

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Franz Brentanos Psychology

• 1. Placed more importance on logic than
  experimentation
• 2. Believed that once important observation were
  completed psychology would change very little
• 3. Psychology should be the study of mental acts
  not the products of mental processes
• 4. He rejected introspection proposed the use
  of imagination

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Brentanos Legacy

• Not very well know primarily due to a lack of
  writing
• Greatest contribution was his impact on his
  students such as Carl Stumpf and Christian von
  Ehrenfels

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Carl Stumpf

• Greatest contributions were to the study of
  auditory perception
• Most famous for his role in the case of Clever
  Hans
• Founded the psychology laboratory at the
  University of Berlin that competed with Wundts
  for prestige

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Influences on Stumpf

• Ernst Mache studies showing that a perception
  is more than the individual elements or
  sensations
• Mache bands
• Christian von Ehrenfels coined the term
  Gestalt to describe the organization of an
  experience
• Musician and composer who showed that melody
  played on a piano in one key, and then played in
  a second key or on a trumpet sounded different
  but were perceived as the same melody

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Stumpfs Psychology

• Mental phenomena not consciousness should be
  studied by psychology study the whole not the
  parts
• Studied tha combination of pure tones into
  complex tones
• Two pure tones presented together produce an
  experience distinctively different from the
  separate tones
• Attacked by Wundt who said as Titchner would have
  said these findings occurred as the result of
  using improperly trained observers

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Oswald Kulpe

• Oswald Kuple, a student of Wundt founded the
  Wurzburg School of psychology
• He gradually moved away from a Wundtian
  perspective to one more similar to Stumpf

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Kulpes Psychology

• Refuted much of Wundts psychology, but without
  the vicious attacks
• Important findings
• Imageless thought some thoughts required no
  images or sensations doubting, searching, etc.
• Complex mental processes can be studied
• Phenomena of mental sets
• Stressed the importance of motivation in problem
  solving

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Decline of the Wurzburg School

• The clash of scientific ideas between Wurzburg
  Stumpf and wundt Titchner eventually led to the
  decline of both
• The Wurzburg school died when Kulpe died in 1915
  as structuralism died when Titchner died

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Obscurity of Many Early German Psychologists

• WWI many went into the armed forces or their
  students left for the war
• Loss of students meant their was no one to
  continue their work
• American focus on functionalism and behaviorism
  gave less importance to these Germans cognitive
  perspectives