Topical Blog Week #5 (Due Thursday)

I chose to research more on Weber’s Law because I found it very interesting after I read the book. I find that people may not notice a difference when lifting weights until the noticeable difference is added (0.2 kg). Not many people would think twice about this and think they would be able to tell the difference, but I think it would be harder than expected. It fits in this chapter because this chapter talks a lot about perception and sensory, which you use to try and distinguish if there is a difference in the weights you are holding.
Weber’s law is pretty simple you can understand it. If you lift a weight around 2.0 kg and hold it up you will notice it takes a little effort to do so, if you add to this weight another 0.5 kg you may not notice a difference between just the 2.0 kg and the 2.5 kg. If you keep adding weight, you might find that you will only notice a difference when the additional weight is equal to 0.2 kg. The noticeable difference for an object of 2.0 kg is 0.2 kg. If a weight is 5.0 kg you will notice that the noticeable difference is 0.5 kg; the larger the weight the larger the noticeable weight will be. The noticeable difference is “the minimum amount by which stimulus intensity must be changed in order to produce a noticeable variation in sensory experience”. In other words it is the amount of weight that is added to another weight that someone will notice.
Weber’s law showed that mental and physical events could be related mathematically and also that there is not a one-to-one relationship between changes in the physical world and psychological experience of those changes. For example, increasing a weight by 3 grams does not always produce the same sensation; so it is important to know more than just the physical dimension of the stimuli to which we are exposed. This also brings up that we must be aware of how the mind perceives those physical stimuli. This reminds me of the discussion of different sensory perception by Johannes Muller in chapter 3; people distinguish things differently so it does depend on that.
http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/faculty/montag/vandplite/pages/chap_3/ch3p1.html - Added the mathematical definitions to help better understand.
http://people.usd.edu/~schieber/coglab/WebersLaw.html - Talked more about what the noticeable difference is and the role is can play.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDDmlBCequ8 – Funny you-tube video.

Ernst Weber was born in 1795 and contributed to the field of psychology through his work with Gustav Fechner and Psychophysics and on his own by creating Weber’s Law (Just Noticeable Difference). Weber’s Law includes a mathematical formula that creates what he calls a “just noticeable difference” or the amount of weight change needed in a particular object to detect, or perceive, that the weight has actually changed. More interesting is that he was so interested in experimentation and not only learning about perception of weight differences, but also of differences noticed through sight and sound. (Neuroportraits).
Weber’s interest in the physiological aspects of psychology is likely linked to the fact that he studied medicine and focused on comparative anatomy (Bookrags). He was very interested in learning about the senses and how our perceptions work; he was one of the first psychologists to experiment in such a way.
This isn’t Weber’s only interesting discovery, though. As stated on the Encyclopedia website, he discovered that some parts of the brain when electrically stimulated will cause a decrease in heart rate, or might even stop the heart completely. Weber also seemed more interested in branching off and discovering something different than what the science of the times had to offer—he worked on perception rather than vision and hearing which were more common at the time (Encyclopedia).

The only problem I found with finding information about Ernst Weber is that there is not much information about him that differs from website to website, it is all just repetitive.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Ernst_Heinrich_Weber.aspx –I chose this website because it offers a lot of biographical information and there were some interesting things about Weber within the reading.
http://neuroportraits.eu/portrait/ernst-heinrich-weber --I stumbled upon this page and thought that it was interesting and it provided information about Fechner, as well.
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ernst-heinrich-weber-woh --there was a lack of information available about Weber and this was the final website I found. I was really interested in learning more about him, so I just used this website to read more.

The topic I was most interested in after reading this chapter is the concepts of absolute threshold and differential threshold, and the differences and similarities between them. This topic fits into our chapter because our text discusses the life and work of Ernest Weber, mentioning his work with sensory thresholds. Weber was the first to discuss this topic of thresholds, and therefore relates to what we read in the chapter. It also relates because sensation and perception are huge topics of study in the field of psychology, which can relate to a lot of research that is discussed throughout our text. This topic interests me because once I read what the actual definitions of these topics was, I was interested to know more about how we apply them and how it fits into our lives.
An absolute threshold is the smallest detectable level of a stimulus, whereas a differential threshold is the measure of how different two stimuli must be in order for a subject to notice that they are not the same. The first systematic studies of sensory thresholds were done by Ernest Weber. Starting with the absolute threshold, the stimulus starts out at such a low level that some subjects will sometimes detect a stimulus, and other times not. This means an absolute threshold could instead be the lowest intensity at which a stimulus is detected 50% of the time. This could be influenced by several different factors, including: adaptation to the stimulus, the subject’s willingness and expectations, and the cognitive processes of the subject. Absolute threshold is used to measure things such as vision, hearing, and odor. For vision it could be the location of a stimulus, wavelength (of rod cells in the eye), or stimulus size. Another example would be hearing; what is the minimum sound level of a pure tone of an average ear with normal hearing can hear with no other sound present? These kinds of questions get confusing, but I find it to be very interesting! As with the differential stimulus, it is the “just-noticeable difference” between a starting and secondary level of a particular stimulus (sensory). Just as with the absolute threshold, differential thresholds may not be detected every time by subjects. This means that the quantity is statistical, rather than exact. If we were measuring a person’s auditory frequency discrimination we would take a number of steps: pick a baseline, pick a set of increments, present the baseline & increments in pairs, randomly choose which one comes first (asking the subject which had the higher frequency), plot the results, and lastly, fit the curve. Another term I came across while researching these topics is the Weber Fraction. The Weber Fraction is the fractional increase above a baseline value that can be reliably detected. This helps us better examine and compare our data when we are finished. I am glad I researched this topic because I feel like I know a lot more terminology (even if I did not mention them in this blog), because reading through these sites explained a lot about sensation and perception that I did not know before, but was always interested in learning.
http://allpsych.com/psychology101/sensation.html This site helped to give a basic definition of what each topic meant, and how they were related and different.
http://courses.washington.edu/psy333/lecture_pdfs/Week1_Day3.pdf This was an extremely helpful powerpoint presentation I found that gave examples of each absolute and differential threshold, and clearly explained how we measure and define them.
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/intro-to-sensation-and-perception.html This site helped explain what the differential threshold was in more detail. It gave examples and was very useful.

After reading chapter 4, I decided to further research Ernest Weber and his theory of the two-point threshold. This fits in the chapter, because we are looking at psychophysics, and psychophysics originated with the addition of Weber’s sensory research. I find this topic interesting, because it looks at the skin on our body differently, and even shows a mathematical relationship between touch and sensation.

Ernest Weber was a professor at the University of Leipzig. He was interested in the sense of touch and how it was perceived. He studied this, and even was the first to distinguish between the different types of touch. Before his discovery, the sense of touch was just known as one thing. Weber was able to dissect the sense of touch into difference types of touch like pressure, pain, tickle, and even temperature. One of Weber’s most prominent discoveries was that of the two-point thresholds. He was curious about the distance at which two pints were separated would someone become aware that there were two points rather than one. In order to measure this, he used a compass-like tool that would put pressure on the skin. Weber would note the shortest distance at which the subject could sense that there were two points. This distance was called the two-point threshold. One interesting fact was that Weber found the shortest two-point threshold to be on the tongue. From this research, he hypothesized that sensory receptors were not spread equally through the body. He believed that differences in theses distances were the results of sensory circles. They were called sensory circles, because nerve fibers formed into a small circle of nerve endings. Weber theorized that if two sensory circles were stimulated, then two different sensations could be felt. What accounted for the two-point threshold was that if one sensory circle was stimulated, even in different parts of the circle, only one sensation could be felt.

http://books.google.com/books?id=iZwXnfYAo3oC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=two+point+threshold+weber&source=bl&ots=cAgRkegJRl&sig=uVqwlCb--jJsGQjHn1ctLeo8lAc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qFhbUKibNMXfyAHn-oGAAQ&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=two%20point%20threshold%20weber&f=false
-Information on Weber and his work on two-point thresholds.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Ernst_Heinrich_Weber.aspx
-Biography of Weber.
http://books.google.com/books?id=xEd8JglYzFwC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=sensory+circles+weber&source=bl&ots=SyGh7vgplS&sig=mKrxx9mgnKugxgFOKUX8fN2JSR4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FGBbULK-PLOByQHQk4HgDA&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=sensory%20circles%20weber&f=false
-Weber’s work on sensory circles.

After reading the chapter I was very interested in Ernst Weber and his two very unique contributions to psychology. The first thing he discovered was about sensory perception in the skin and how different points on the hand or arm may be more sensitive than others. He also came up with a law of called Weber’s law which was a basis of muscle sense or “kinesthesis”. This chapter had a lot to do with perception and sensory which Weber made a major contribution to the German revolution of psychology which interested me very much.
Weber to my knowledge was one of the first psychologist’s to experiments with humans which were a huge breakthrough with psychology. He devoted his work to the perception of sensory and perception style experiments that led to his discovery of Weber’s law which is his theory that mathematics can relate to psychology. Weber used test subjects to lift different weighted objects to determine their differences in weight. He found that if the subjects noticed a small change there was no difference at all and he called them a ratio. He discovered that his ration had a measurement of 1 to 40 and small differences between were not noticed. He also discovered that using different parts to life your mind would perceive the weight differently. Weber also did the same experiment with different forms of perception such as light, smell, vision, pain, and even hearing which I was not aware at all.
Weber also did many experiments with touch as he touched different parts of the hands and arm to determine how they react to the mind. He discovered that touching different places of the hand such as the thumb the feelings are constant, but when touching the upper arm you have to touch closer areas together are much more noticeable in regards to the area of skin. Weber even graphed his work on how the body perceives this information and opened up the door to many other scientists in his line of work. His work also related too many of the other German psychologists and it is very cool to start making correlations between different psychologists and can clearly see how each on learns from another or adds on to each other’s work.
http://www.answers.com/topic/ernst-heinrich-weber - Additional information about Weber’s law.
http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/74/Ernst-Heinrich-Weber.html - Short bio and info about different experiments with different senses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Heinrich_Weber - Describes Weber as the father of experimental psychology.

After reading chapter 4, I thought the topic of Wundt’s apperception phenomenon that is part of the voluntarism system, which was interesting. I found 3 sources that represent how apperception is used. The definition of apperception is “the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole (Wikipedia, 2012).”

1- Therefore the first website contains how apperception is used in psychology and how the mind consciously organizes experiences. I thought it to be very interesting that this topic is used a lot in children. There was a specific example of a rich and poor kid coming to school with only $10. The rich child thought the $10 was not very much, but the poor child though the $10 was a lot of money. The apperception of the event is different in each child due to their organizing of past experiences. The poor child is not used to that amount of money because it has great value. However, the rich child does not believe that the value of the $10 is very much. The same event happened, but because of their voluntarism mind, labels the event differently.

2- The scholarly research article is a study of responses of preschool children when taking the Children’s Apperception Test. The above example from the other website shows how children can view things in a totally different way. There have been actual tests done called the CAT to see how children’s fantasies interrupt (apperceive) the projective test. The CAT given to these children could indicate their personality development and attitude toward a parental figure. I thought this test was very interesting in apperception because the child uses subconsciously events from past experiences to answer certain pictures. I really thought this was interesting because the children may have fantasies that a psychologist would conclude as aggressive, fear, or personality dysfunction.

3- The YouTube was definitely one of the best resources I could find to visually see the CAT test and how children would respond to it. The woman was trying to get the “child” to take the CAT, and showed him pictures while he made up a story of what was happening. The projective test was used to show apperception test and the fantasy of children. Children will use apperception because their mind creates a meaning behind it. The brain will organize information into meaningful wholes, and the test shows that. The reenactment was so interesting because researchers actually use these tests to determine apperception.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apperception
-Definition/ history of apperception

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/1126151
-A scholarly research on responses of preschool children to apperception tests

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYgCZXFTHDs
- A YouTube video containing a reenactment of a child taking the apperception test

After reading chapter 4 I chose to research more on Ernst Weber. I found him and his theories very interesting. He was one of the first to get into the area of psychophysics. He seemed to think ahead of what anyone else was researching at the time. This related to chapter 4 because he was a German born scientist and the chapter discusses Germany and psychology.
Ernst Heinrich Weber was born on June 24, 1795 in Wittenberg Germany. He was the 3rd of 13 children. Ernst decided to study medicine at Wittenberg University where he eventually received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1815, in Physiology. Upon graduation he immediately went into teaching. Once he was a professor in 1818, he was appointed associate professor of comparative anatomy. In 1821 he was named as a professor of physiology and anatomy. Between the 1820s and 1830s Weber began to study the tactile senses, weight perceptions and the two point threshold. Weber’s main focus during this research was on the sense of touch and kinesthesia. Kinesthesia, is described as the sense by which movement, weight, position, ect. are perceived. Weber was the first in the field to demonstrate the existence of kinesthesia and also was the first to show that touch was a sense composed of senses for temperature, pressure and pain. Ernst decided to publish his early work in 1834 but it was in Latin and a lot was unable translate. Luckily in 1846 he decided to publish his earlier work with some of his later work in German this time. In 1834 Webers law was presented based on his past and current research. Weber’s law is the perception of change in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus. He also attempted to find a way to physically measure stimulus perceptions through a mathematical formula. This formula was given the name Weber’s law of just noticeable difference. This law is describes as the minimum amount by which stimulus intensity may be changed in order to produce a noticeable difference in sensory variations. This is what his formula looked like. ∆S/S = K.
The “S” represents the change in stimulus which is just noticeable or perceived 50% of the time. This is the actual value of the stimulus. K would be used in this equation as the constant term.
The experiment he used to describe his research was with different weights. For example, if someone held a 50 pound weight in one hand and a 52 pound weight in the other they would in fact be able to tell the difference between the two hands and weight amounts. This is the just-noticeable difference. This law as mentioned before in known as Weber’s law and was the first law relation physical stimulus with a mental experience. Weber’s research on the senses led to the introduction of the experimental method in psychology. The two point threshold was another idea that Weber researched and put into motion. This is the concept of measuring the smallest distance of noticeable space between touch at different points of the human body. An example that was used was a compass on the thumb compared to on the upper arm. The thumb has a smaller threshold and therefor was more noticeable when two points were touching in compared to the upper arm. He determined then that the tongue had the smallest threshold at 1mm while the back had the largest which was 60 mm. He retired as a professor of physiology in 1866 and as a professor of anatomy in 1871. His findings were still researched well beyond his era. He was nicknamed the father of psychophysics which still holds true to this day. Ernst Weber died in 1878. His findings in several fields played a huge role in what is now known as kinesthesia. Ernst Weber was in many ways a founder of science for his time and has allowed many people after him to held advance the field of medicine, psychophysics and even psychology. He was a very interesting man to research and I learned a lot from this assignment on what he did during his time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Heinrich_Weber
This website gave me most of the information I was looking for to find out more on Ernst Weber.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/psychbeginnings.html
This gave a history of all the important psychological discoveries which included weber. This also helped me compare his discoveries to others.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Psychophysics.htm
This gave a breakdown of his just formula for the just noticeable difference. Explained how it worked.
http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/74/Ernst-Heinrich-Weber.html
This website helped with the general biography of Ernst Weber. It started at birth and ended with death. It gave a brief description of his life.

After reading chapter four, I looked more into the topic of apperception. Wundt was very interested in the conscious experience and how the mind actively organizes its experiences. This system that he created was called voluntarism. A central concept was the idea of apperception, which by the Dictionary of Philosophy is defined as, “The process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experiences of an individual to form a new whole. The residuum of past experience is called the apperceptive mass.” In other words, apperception is when the mind actively organizes information from past and present information or experiences and turns the information into a meaningful whole.
Another concept within apperception that Wundt pointed out is that we have states of attention. Meaning that currently we are focusing on one specific activity, such as reading this entry, and are actively focusing on the meaning of what you are reading. Other information, such as the people around us, would be our periphery attention. Meaning, we know they are there but we are not actively focusing on them.
Wundt believed that when apperception occurs, it isn’t just an activity of the mind, but includes gathering past experiences and even bringing in a person’s emotions to fully understand a specific concept or piece of information. For example, when watching a movie as an adult, you may suddenly realize the meaning of an event that occurs in the movie or a statement that is said by a character. You have heard it over and over when you were younger but now you fully understand the meaning of what you have just seen or heard. This is apperception. Your mind actively brought in your past-experiences and information and has brought this current experience into a meaningful whole.

http://www.psychology-online.net/articles/doc-763.html
-Provided information about what apperception involves such as pre-exsisting ideas and emotions.

http://www.kurtdanziger.com/positiv%20repud.pdf
-Provided information about the different states of attention

http://www.ditext.com/runes/a.html
-Provided a distinct definition of "apperception."

I found the life and work of Hermann Ebbinghaus to very interesting. This is an area that we are very obsessed with today. Magazines, News articles are filled with information on aiding memory staving off dementia and Alzheimer’s. I believe this is part of our American quest to remain youthful as well as the fear of not being self-sufficient.
One of the most fascinating parts of Ebbinghaus’s work was that it was seemingly so revolutionary. He not only conducted these studies but he also invented them. Like many scientists he used himself as a subject. He had to invent the stimuli, what came to be known as nonsense syllables, he created methods to test them. He then had to figure out how to measure his results.
He was the first to come up with a learning curve, how long we retain things and the most effective ways to retain. He noted that retention was best when practiced soon after learning. I guess that’s why the math teachers always say to do your assignment right away while the concept is still fresh.
His work was not just about how quickly we forget but also gave us ways to test how to remember better. One way was that practice would cement things to longer term memory. I also found his theory of the “Spacing Effect” interesting. He said that what would be the equivalent of cramming for finals today, was ineffective in real learning even short term. Instead a little at a time for instance 15 minutes a day over the entire semester would produce more desirable results. I have seen this used by my daughters’ Spanish teachers, who assign a few flash cards a night that take approximately ten minutes to complete. I did notice that the daughter who did not do this regularly did struggle more in the class.
As I read about the work and studies of Ebbinghaus it occurred to me that he was focused on learning, retaining knowledge. His focus was not on passing the test. I thought that it seems much of this is not applied in today’s society when teachers are forced to teach the test in order to prove their worthiness as educators. I think we are probably missing out on some knowledge when we are simply rote memorizing rather than really thinking and applying what is being taught.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
This had some good information on the Spacing Effect.
http://www.web-us.com/memory/hermann_ebbinghaus.htm
This site gave some good background to the establishment of his tests.
http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/the-ebbinghaus-curve-of-forgetting
In this site there were some modern day applications for the work of Ebbinghaus.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Ebbinghaus.htm
I found facts about his life and research on this site.

The topic of interest I chose after reading chapter four was that of psychology as it begins adopting the technique of experimentation and doing the experimentation in a laboratory at a university. I picked this idea out of the chapter because it seems the most central to what psychology became later, a fully experimental science and one centered in universities.

Wundt gets most of the credit for establishing psychology as a laboratory science, although as I found out there were those who did psychological experiments before him. I also learned that some people claim Williams James in the United States established a laboratory as early- or maybe even earlier- than Wundt.

The date most cited for Wundt is 1879, though there is even disagreement about this in some of the sites I read on the internet. Whatever the date, it is clear that Wundt attracted students from around the world, and especially from the United States, and that they would later go back to their countries and open laboratories to study psychological topics that they had learned from him. Wundt’s students opened these laboratories in universities and some of those laboratories later evolved into departments of psychology. * I also read that, in the early decades, many of the laboratories were either located in -or somehow connected to - departments of philosophy and only later broke off into their own independent departments of psychology.

There were other early figures who did experimentation on humans that helped developed this idea of studying psychological questions in a laboratory. These early experimental psychologists included: Donders, who helped develop the use of reaction time to study the speed of mental processes in around 1869, Ebbinghuas who invented the nonsense syllable for the study of memory and used himself as his own subject (around 1885), and Fechner who developed the whole field of psychophysics and with it the methods of psychophysics (such as the method of limits in the 1860s).

So there were many people from 1860 to 1890 who helped psychology become an experimental science. But we still give most of the credit to Wundt. The one thing that he did that went beyond just making psychology experimental was bringing this focus to the university. As well as print – for example: after research was done in the lab the students needed somewhere to publish their results, so Wundt created a journal called Philosophische Studien in 1881.

Today, we can be psychology “majors” largely because of what Wundt did in the 1870s.

http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Wundt.htm
http://www.wilhelmwundt.com/wilhelm-wundt-psyhology2.php
http://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
These sites give a summary of Wundt’s contributions.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Consciousness.html
This is a very informative article on Fechner titled: Mind, Brain, and the Experimental Psychology of Consciousness…..“It is in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) that we find the formal beginning of experimental psychology”

http://schorlab.berkeley.edu/vilis/whatis.htm
This site contains information on Donders and his part in the history of experimental psychology.

The topic I have chosen is G.E. Muller. I learned in the chapter that he’s not very famous because his work was never translated and he never really found anything new. I also learned though that he was in the lab more than anyone else in his time and was very meticulous. I would like to expand my knowledge on his research and his life.
Muller had three main interests in his lifetime and was recognized by his contemporaries as the mester experimenter and methodologist in these areas which are psychophysics, memory and learning, and vision. He did however, do research on other things but these were the three things that he cared about throughout his lifetime. Although Wilhem Wundt was the founder of psychology, Muller was the one who lead the path in new experimental psychology when it was first being found in Germany. Muller was a very close runner up to Wundt, but Wundt’s lab was the best. Muller was known as THE methodologist of psychological experimentation, because he had a reputation of being extremely careful. He was tested for each experiment carried out in his lab. Even though in today’s textbooks Muller’s name is mentioned only slightly if at all his work was still appreciated in the 1950s.
Muller was a German experimental psychologist. He was born near Leipig, where he studied for a year. He then moved to Berlin to continue his studies, but volunteered for the army. In 1871 he began his studies again and began working with Lotze at Gottingen. He stayed there for the next 40 years. He developed a theory of memory, using Ebbinghaus’ techniques with nonsense syllables in which forgetting is caused by interference from later-learned material, rather than from the “fading away” of an original memory.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Georg_Elias_Muller.aspx
http://web.sau.edu/WaterStreetMaryA/george_e_mueller.htm
http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/6/2/77.full
Combined I took a little out of each to write a about his work and his life.

Wilhelm Wundt is the person of interest that I decided to research for this weeks topical blog assignment. Wilhelm Wundt and his contributions to the field of psychology were a big part of chapter four. I’m interested in Wundt and his work because of how he was able to change psychology from a branch of philosophy, to its own field. Also, I found it very interesting that Wundt supposedly created the first experimental psychology lab on accident.

Wilhelm Wundt changed the course of psychology and is famous for it. Wundt started out as a medical doctor and decided he didn’t like that trade. He then moved to his greater interest, philosophy. Psychology was just a branch of philosophy at the time and Wundt wanted to change that. Wilhelm wanted to create experimental psychology, but encountered many obstacles in the form of other scientists. Other researchers (Kant), stated that to be measurable, mathematics had to be involved somewhere. Kant then went on to describe how conscious thoughts cannot be measured mathematically. This put a sudden stop to Wundt turning psychology into something observable and measurable. Soon enough, Weber made a fascinating discovery. Weber discovered that weights placed in some ones hand could create a measurable sensation to the brain. They could in fact be mathematically proven, so, the gates of empirical psychology opened.

Wilhelm also created introspection. This is essentially, “self-observation”. Wundt stated that all observable psychology must start at the inner workings of the mind. However, he was also aware of the self report bias that could occur.

It’s said that Wilhelm Wundt created the first experimental psychology laboratory while he was at the University of Leipzig in Germany. I found the rumor the text provided about this very interesting. It said that Wundt acquired many different scientific instruments over a long period of time and when he was asked to work at Leipzig, he requested room for these to be stored. That room ended up turning into a lab that held psychological experiments. His laboratory model was the base for other laboratories around the world. The second experimental psychological laboratory was created in the United States by one of Wundt’ students, G. Stanley Hall.

http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/wundt.shtml -- Biological Profile. Provided a short, straight to the point biography of Wundt.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/ -- Very through summary of all aspects and anything related to Wundt.

http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/f/first-psychology-lab.htm -- Describes who created the first, and second psychology laboratories.

My topic of interest this week is a person. I really enjoyed learning about the German Psychologist-in particular Gustav Fechner. I was most interested in Fechner’s take on what happened to our conscious after we died. I am interested in Fechner and his craziness (freak outs and independent/interesting philosophies) and it ties into the context of this chapter as it looked at Fechner’s law and discussed him as a German psychologist in this pervious chapter. I am interesting in what made him think the way he did and how he came up with his interesting and spiritual seeming theories in terms of our consciousness. I really enjoyed his take on intelligence and consciousness and I wanted to explore more into his world.

First and foremost, I am in awe of the fact that he studied medicine at Leipzig University under Weber at the age of ONLY 16. Granted, we had much shorter life spans back in the day, but it’s still hard to imagine a 16 year old male working with medicine! Perhaps this was why he had such an unraveling; he was so uptight and serious at a young age (joke). The part that interest me is when Fechner has his nervous break. This is when he becomes more philosophical. He had a nervous break and went blind as a result of staring at the sun too much for his experiments/research. After his nervous fit, he resigned from Leipzig and isolated himself. While he was isolated he began to look (not really b/c he was blind-punny) at metaphysics. Basically, he flopped interests and looked at philosophy more as he later would return to Leipzig as a philosophy professor.

Another interesting thing about Fechner is that his law itself is not actually divisible as is. There are parts of the equation that make it difficult to ever be practically used. Fechner developed his law after he had resigned from Leipzig and before he came back. His law deals with sensations and stimulus through a logarithm formula. Interestingly enough, it seemed that nearly every source that talked about Fechner’s Law was talking about how the division equations in it were not really possible and that his idea was good but needed to be revised. It’s interesting to think that someone so famous that we have to learn about them in a
history of psychology class, was actually not all that correct and a little bit of a looney pants.

While Fechner was blind from research/gazing at the sun, and struggling with digestion and eating, he looked at the mind-body connections, also known as consciousness. At the time everyone thought that he had just gone crazy. I wonder if these accounts of him being crazy would have been made in modern times. I appreciate that the part of the chapter I found to be most interesting was the philosophy of consciousness posed by a man who was said to have gone crazy and ill. He was apparently delusional and in a euphoric state. I think that after reading about how “crazy” and depressed Fechner was, I appreciate his view point even more. He got everyone thinking and it even seems a little scandalous. He also was humanistic which, in his time period, was not a typical viewpoint. Also, his “Dad View” was pretty weird as he seemed to think that all things had consciousness. Fechner was one crazy guy and I enjoyed learning about him!

I wish I could have found some more objective descriptions of why exactly Fechner was believed to be crazy. It seemed as if everything just stated it nonchalantly as if it were fact and not relative. I don’t really know what or even how crazy he was. I just know that he had what was called a nervous breakdown and his thoughts were believed to be abnormal as he took his own unique take on life, death, consciousness, and the consciousness of both the living and the dead.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Consciousness.html -talks about Fechner’s take on mind, brain, and consciousness from an experimental perspective.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/133/3446/80 -Contains an interesting article that talks about how Fechner’s Law is not actually possible to calculate using equation. Article revises Fechner’s Law.

http://www.theassc.org/files/assc/Faw_Poster_Presentation.pdf -Touched on Fechner’s views of consciousness and some comparisons to modern consciousness.

http://people.bethel.edu/~johluc/history-resource/fechner.html -Fechner’s “Day View” and summary of works and some crazy thoughts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Fechner -Obvious mass source of Fechner information. Provides an overview of his life, basically-his biography.

http://elvers.us/hop/index.asp?m=3&a=70&key=62 -Source of multiple Fechner articles for reference.

The topic I decided I wanted to know more about from this chapter is Gustav Fechner. I had a little trouble fully understand the section over him and wanted a more in depth understanding because the section in the book over Fechner is not a big part of this chapter. He spent most of his life at the University of Leipzig, where he studied and became a physics professor. He believed that bodily facts and conscious facts are just different ways to look at the same thing or situation. The Weber-Fechner law was part of his attempt to mathematically find the relationship between the two. The formula is S=c log R. The S stands for sensation, c for is the constant, and R for numerical estimate for the stimulus. A sensation difference remains constant when a relative stimulus difference stays constant as well. Others criticize him because you can’t have a true composite score for a sensation. While this law is not perfect and has flaws it still upholds the principle of psychic measurement, it is fundamental in the study of psychics. This law has limitations, the law is generalized in order to try and expand the knowledge of psychics measurement of sensation. It helps discover and examine the scientific relationship. So, basically the validity of this measurement is limited. Gustav is seen as one of the founders of experimental psychology. He tried to show others that psychology can be a quantified science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Fechnr - It gave me a good overview of Fechner as a person and his achievements.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Fechner/ - made the Weber-Fechner law easier to understand and comprehend.
http://www.psiwebsubr.org/SUBR/studyguides/488/Fechner.pdf - Gave a more details description of the law and Frechner’s research.

My topic is apperception. It fits into the chapter by being a central concept of Wundt’s voluntaristic system. I am interested in it because the concept of perceiving some event with full clarity, focus, and attention seems like how I would like to perceive most things in life.
Apperception displays the notion that our experience does not always correspond to the physical reality. We may then perceive distortions of reality, or illusions, at periods of no correspondence. Wundt discovered this concept during his work on optical illusions. His studies earned him the classification of Wundt illusions for optical illusions which he first described.
A Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective measure of a person’s thought patterns, attitudes, observational capacity, and emotional responses to neutral test materials. It is one of the oldest projective measures in use today. It is better accepted than the Rorschach among clinicians and has become the most popular projective technique among English-speaking psychiatrists and psychologists.
Voluntarism is Wundt’s system of psychology that emphasized the role of unconscious and conscious choice of certain parts of consciousness based upon personal feelings, motivations, and history. He made psychology a new, independent academic discipline. Wundt did so by rejecting the materialist position held by many physiologists at the time. These physiologists argued that describing and understanding the mechanics of the body would create the facts of psychology.
http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Thematic-Apperception-Test.html - I wanted to see how apperception can be tested. The Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders did a wonderful job explaining the Thematic Apperception Test: its purpose; precautions; description; and history.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Wilhelm_Wundt - I wanted to learn how Wundt influenced the studies of apperception. The New World Encyclopedia concisely spelled out Wundt’s work with optical illusion and apperception.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/voluntar/ - I wanted to have a basic overview of the system of which apperception is a central concept. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy did a thorough description of the system, especially its philosophical origins.