What I would like you to do is to find a topic or person from this week's chapter that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find a video clip that demonstrates something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. Please use at least 3 quality resources.
Once you have completed your search and explorations, a) I would like you to say what your topic is, b) how exactly it fits into the chapter, and c) why you are interested in it. Next, I would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. Keep in mind that it will be easier if you keep it to one topic.
Additional instructions: For each URL (internet resource) you have listed. Indicate why you chose it and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
TB Ch. 4
I chose to do more research on Wilhelm Wundt and his idea of new psychology. Wundt's ideas fit into the chapter because of his new ideas and creations. His idea like immediate and mediate experiences fits into the previous chapter that introduced perception. I am interested in learning more about Wundt's idea of new psychology because I feel the concept is something we use a lot today in psychology.
Wilhelm Wundt was a German physiologist and Psychologist who made Psychology a field of its own. He was the first person in history to be called a “psychologist,” as well as the first person to teach a course in Physiological Psychology. He was the first person to establish a laboratory in Psychology, The Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1879. But most importantly he spent a majority of his life working intensively on a culturally sensitive approach to psychology. He was known as the father of psychology. Wundt was important because he separated psychology from philosophy by analyzing the workings of the mind in a more structured way, with the emphasis being on objective measurement and control. Wundt was the first person to take all of the nineteenth century’s sprouting of the new psychology onto the old and creating his new science, and published a book on physiological psychology, Contributions towards a Theory of Sense Perception, which created a vision of psychology as a field of its own containing three general subdivisions. The subdivisions are: principles of the physical sciences, social sciences, and scientific metaphysics. He had many things that he focused on, one of which recorded thoughts and sensations, and to analyze them into their constituent elements, in much the same way as chemist analyses chemical compounds, in order to get at the underlying structure. For this reason, the school of psychology founded by Wundt is known as structuralism. He wanted to study the structure of the human mind; this is when he argued the usage of introspection to study the conscious mental states. Introspection and many others of Wundt’s theories and ideas were not accepted by many psychologists during that time. Introspection did not remain a tool of psychological self-examination. I assume that it was not reliable enough to keep using. So in order for Wundt’s contributions to psychology stay in use, he began using carefully controlled conditions, this is the experimental methods that he developed. One new psychology was known, many other psychologist began to use the experimental methods in their own research. Many areas in psychology were marked with experimental methods like behavioral (Skinner) for instant. Wundt concentrated on three areas of mental functioning; thoughts, images and feelings. These are the basic areas studied today in cognitive psychology. This means that the study of perceptual process can be traced back to Wundt. Wundt’s work stimulated interest in cognitive psychology.
On the basis of Wundt’s work, he is what helped psychology become what it is today. Without his contributions psychology would possibly have very less disciplines. In the history of psychology I feel that Wundt was the most influential on his students and other psychologist of his time and after. By his devotion and consistency, experimental psychology was made a huge part of what we call psychology today. I feel that he deserves a lot of credit for that because, without his contributions psychology would not be what it is today.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
I chose this webpage because it focused on more of Wundt's contributions to psychology.
http://www.psych.utah.edu/gordon/Classes/Psy4905Docs/PsychHistory/Cards/Wundt.html
This webpage didn't have very much information, but it defiantly went more in depth on structuralism and his idea of what it was.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/wundtjames.html
This webpage shared a lot of Wundt's background, I used very little background in my blog but I felt it would be helpful to know who he was more in depth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wundt
I chose this webpage simply because it withheld all the information i would need to refer back to about all his contributions, publications, works, and bibliography.
After reading chapter four I wanted to learn more about James McKeen Cattell.
A short background about James McKeen Cattell is that he was the oldest child of a very rich family. His family was known because his father was a minister and then became the president of the Easton College, while his uncle was a U.S. senator for New Jersey. James started college at the age of sixteen. An interesting fact about James Cattell is that he enjoyed English literature. James Cattell was in Germany because he was in his graduate program. While in Germany he met Wilhelm Wundt who became his mentor until he left this longtime friend to come up with his own ideas in psychology that would contradict those of his mentor. Cattell was then the first American to ever publish a dissertation.
Cattell made many contributions to psychology and published many journals. He mainly focused on intelligence and even would use himself as a subject when he consumed drugs to see what would happen. Cattell was very interested in getting people to believe that psychology was indeed a science because during his time people considered psychology to be a lesser science. One of the things that he studied was the reaction time for humans. In doing this he basically created the term mental tests which would be used to characterize the tests that he performed on people that had to do with their minds. His mental tests included measurements of sensation, reaction time, human memory span, and the rate of movement, which was determined by weights. Three journals that he created were “The Psychology Review,” “Journal of Science,” and “Popular Science Monthly.”
Now there is an award called the James McKeen Cattell Fund. This fund has been around for about fifty years and has been providing support for the science and the application of psychology. Cattell set up this fund for the purpose to support "scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge with the object of obtaining results beneficial to the development of the science of psychology and to the advancement of the useful application of psychology." Over the years this fund has grown with other gifts given to it and now is able to help out a lot of different people and labs. In the most recent years from 2007-2009 there were 125 applications sent in for this award and only 7 were given the award. The most to ever apply was in the year 1986-1988 which was 241 and 20 people actually received this award.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/james-mckeen-cattell.htm
I like this site because it was a psychology site and it was a short to the point biography about James Cattell. It was a good outline to think about when writing my blog
http://www.cattell.duke.edu/catthist.html
This website helped for what his accomplishments are doing now. This website is about the James McKeen Cattell Fund, the history and how to go about applying for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McKeen_Cattell
Finally this website was a more in depth biography about him. I needed some exact details when writing my blog and this one helped me accomplish that.
After reading chapter four, the subject I wanted to research more and learn more about was Wilhelm Wundt. He was such an important contribution to the field of psychology, I wanted to learn more about him and what he did.
We all know Wilhelm Wundt was from Germany, but some of us probably don't know that aside form being a psychologist, he was also a physiologist, philosopher, professor, and physician. Talk about multi-talented. Wundt was the first person ever to declare psychology an individual field of study, and also as a discipline of science. He was labeled as the "father of psychology" and he also founded the first formal lab for psychological research. He opened an Institute for Experimental Psychology in 1879, and this was located in Leipzig, Germany. He also formed the first journal for psychological research among all of his other contributions to psychology.
Wundt analyzed the working mind in a more structured way. He explored the nature of religious beliefs, identified mental disorders, and also studied abnormal behavior. He used and taught a method called introspection that would later be labeled unreliable. It was based off self-examination, and was biased by personal interpretation and or personal experience.
Wilhelm Wundt accomplished many, many things in his lifetime. He is such an important figure in the history of psychology, and without his contributions and declarations in psychology, it would not be what it is today, and we would not even be in this class had it not be for him and his findings in psychology.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wundt
Hermann Ebbinghaus was one whom I was interested in learning more about from chapter 4. Chapter 4 discussed some of what he contributed to memory but I wanted to find out if he did anything else. I like learning about memory, and I like figuring out what psychological experiments have been done to show how we obtain information. Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist. He is most known for coming up with the Forgetting Curve and the Spacing Effect.
Ebbinghaus came up with the Forgetting Curve by testing himself. He ended up using nonsense syllables. These worked better because if he had used words he already knew then it would be easier to remember, which in turn would not have helped him. He found that the way information was learned and how often it was studied impacted how fast the information was forgotten. He also discovered that forgetting doesn't continuously decline. Instead forgetting eventually just levels off.
Ebbinghaus' contribution of the Forgetting Curve helped to develop the Spacing Effect. He discovered that he could remember information with less repetition if the studying was spread out rather then cramming it into one session. To do this he used free recall, try to remember items regardless of order, and serial recall, remember items in the correct order. He found that serial recall took longer and was considered overlearning.
I did not know that Ebbinghaus made contributions as well to perception. Along with being known for the Forgetting Curve and the Spacing Effect he is also known for the Ebbinghaus Illusion. However, because he never published his findings in any specific publication it is sometimes known as the Titchener Illusion. Titchener never really took author to this either. The illusion is basically and optical illusion of relative size perception. Meaning if there is a dot surrounded by larger dots and then next to it there is a dot of the same size surrounded by smaller dots, the dots in the middle appear smaller or larger. It is used to study different effects of perception on the brain. This in turn helps the study of brain development and function.
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/p/forgetting.htm
I chose this website because it discussed the Forgetting Curve, but put it into terms I could understand better.
http://www.revunote.com/resources/spaced-repetition/
I liked this website because it not only talked about the Spacing Effect but also gave a quote from Ebbinghaus himself regarding his findings. It made me feel like what I was reading wasn't just pulled out of no where.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ebbinghaus_illusion
This website explained the Ebbinghaus Illusion. It also talked about other ways this discovery helped other areas of psychology.
For my week #5 topical blog I decided to take a closer look into Ernst Weber. This fits into the chapter because in the book we learned about how Weber used psychophysics, a branch of psychology that uses the relationship between physical stimuli and mental states, to come up with several conclusions. A few of his most well-known achievements included the development of the two-point threshold, weber’s law, and the just noticeable difference (jnd). The reason I wanted to learn more about Weber was because they didn’t give much background information on his life so I wanted to read up on his development and what led him to become the successful psychologist that he was.
Ernst Weber was born in Wittenberg, Germany and was one of 13 children. He was raised in an educated him being that his father, Michael Weber, was a professor of theology. While in school Weber spent much of his secondary education learning Latin and in 1811 he began studying medicine at the University of Wittenberg where he eventually would receive his doctor of medicine degree in 1815. Weber specialized in comparative anatomy and in 1818 he was appointed to the position of being an associate professor at Leipzig University in this subject. In 1821 he became a full time independent professor and he taught there until 1871.
Weber became well known because he was one of the first psychologists to experiment. Some of the topics he did research on included touch, pain, sight, hearing, taste, and smell. With these subjects he performed tests on human subjects to find out how psychical stimuli affected their mental states. While preforming these different tests he came up with his term “just noticeable differences”. Although there were many some of the conclusions he drew from these stated that humans noticed 1/16 of a difference in light intensity, 1/13 in pain, 1/10 in pitch, ¼ in smell, and 1/3 in taste. He also drew the conclusion that with incredible extremes, where the changes were to minimal or maximal people would not recognize a difference.
The next of Weber’s studies the two point discrimination that we learned about from the book also had many lasting effects but it wasn’t very important until decades later when other scientists discovered where the free nerve endings in the skin were. Another thing Weber is well known for is his accomplishments in anatomy including the discovery of a rudimentary uterus in male mammals, and again all of his work with the sense organs.
In a few of Weber’s accomplishments he was working with his brothers. In 1845 he and Eduard Friedrich Weber discovered the inhibitory power of the vagus nerve in the brain. Next with his other brother Wilhelm Eduard Weber he made studies of acoustics and wave motion. Last all of his brothers together, made a study about walking. He is notably remembered from transferring his experimental methods of physiology into the psychology field and through all of his work Weber has become known as “the foundation stone of experimental psychology.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Heinrich_Weber
http://geniusrevive.com/en/geniuses?pid=74&sid=253:Ernst-Weber-One-of-the-Founders-of-Psychophysics
http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/74/Ernst-Heinrich-Weber.html#ixzz2Kp39Ze5O
The study of Hermann E bbinghaus and our memory is what was most interesting in this week’s chapter. The first article explains how psychological scientists have only been studying memory for the past 150 years. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus interests with memory recall led him to conduct experiments on himself using his nonsense syllable method; he was determined to find out what the mind can remember and what it forgets. After Ebbinghaus;s death, the study of our memory has continued to evolve through the years. Today memory is still being observed and studied through words, stories, movies, and experiences like a person’s memory after witnessing a traumatic event. Besides measuring how long it takes people to remember important information, there are also now more advanced ways of measuring memory. With today’s technology eye movements can be observed, heartbeats can be measured, and even perspiration can determine a person’s stress level when recalling a particular memory. Using electrodes is another form of measurement that shows how the brain responds to certain stimuli, in other words how we respond to stress. Our minds are complex and sometimes memories can distort the brain in a negative or positive way, it can haunt our thoughts or set them free.
According to the second source just because we sometimes can’t remember certain things doesn’t necessarily mean they are forgotten for good. Some memory images can be called back into consciousness regularly and voluntarily. Memories affect us depending on the particular state of mind we are in during the time of attaching meaning to it. Ebbinghaus was aware of involuntary control and how memories can return spontaneously and take over one’s thoughts. However, these thoughts are not necessarily “random” or “accidental” they could be brought on by images that we associate our memory with which Ebbinghaus called “laws of association.” Ebbinghaus believed the range of thought in our minds is a, “boundless domain” in which our “experience belongs here.” Most thoughts are unconscious of our experiences and according to Ebbinghaus they, “remain concealed from consciousness and yet produce an effect which is significant and which authenticates their previous existence.” Though through the years memory can dwindle and lose its “capacity for being revived” and our thoughts will gradually fade over time.
The third source discussed how Ebbinghaus influenced the examination of human memory through his research with nonsense syllables, memory retention, and the forgetting curve. He understood the importance of repetition and how it was used to strengthen our memory. Through Ebbinghaus’ research of recalling memory, he could determine how quickly we can learn and how quickly we can forget. He came to the conclusion the longer the list was to memorize the more repetitions it took to remember, therefore, cramming for a test in one day is less effective than studying over a longer period of time. Ebbinghaus knew information would likely be forgotten if there is a lapse between learning and relearning. Ebbinghaus’ sentence completion test was able to evaluate the power of memory through people’s own interpretations. These tests would one day be used with intelligence testing.
https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/NewmanLoftus_Ebbinghaus_EJOP12.pdf?uniq=-mksps4
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Ebbinghaus/memory1.htm
http://www.freetopessays.com/content/hermann-ebbinghaus-memory-man
The study of Hermann Ebbinghaus and our memory is what was most interesting in this week’s chapter. The first article explains how psychological scientists have only been studying memory for the past 150 years. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus interests with memory recall led him to conduct experiments on himself using his nonsense syllable method; he was determined to find out what the mind can remember and what it forgets. After Ebbinghaus's death, the study of our memory has continued to evolve through the years. Today memory is still being observed and studied through words, stories, movies, and experiences like a person’s memory after witnessing a traumatic event. Besides measuring how long it takes people to remember important information, there are also now more advanced ways of measuring memory. With today’s technology eye movements can be observed, heartbeats can be measured, and even perspiration can determine a person’s stress level when recalling a particular memory. Using electrodes is another form of measurement that shows how the brain responds to certain stimuli, in other words how we respond to stress. Our minds are complex and sometimes memories can distort the brain in a negative or positive way, it can haunt our thoughts or set them free.
According to the second source just because we sometimes can’t remember certain things doesn't necessarily mean they are forgotten for good. Some memory images can be called back into consciousness regularly and voluntarily. Memories affect us depending on the particular state of mind we are in during the time of attaching meaning to it. Ebbinghaus was aware of involuntary control and how memories can return spontaneously and take over one’s thoughts. However, these thoughts are not necessarily “random” or “accidental” they could be brought on by images that we associate our memory with which Ebbinghaus called “laws of association.” Ebbinghaus believed the range of thought in our minds is a, “boundless domain” in which our “experience belongs here.” Most thoughts are unconscious of our experiences and according to Ebbinghaus they, “remain concealed from consciousness and yet produce an effect which is significant and which authenticates their previous existence.” Though through the years memory can dwindle and lose its “capacity for being revived” and our thoughts will gradually fade over time.
The third source discussed how Ebbinghaus influenced the examination of human memory through his research with nonsense syllables, memory retention, and the forgetting curve. He understood the importance of repetition and how it was used to strengthen our memory. Through Ebbinghaus’ research of recalling memory, he could determine how quickly we can learn and how quickly we can forget. He came to the conclusion the longer the list was to memorize the more repetitions it took to remember, therefore, cramming for a test in one day is less effective than studying over a longer period of time. Ebbinghaus knew information would likely be forgotten if there is a lapse between learning and relearning. Ebbinghaus’ sentence completion test was able to evaluate the power of memory through people’s own interpretations. These tests would one day be used with intelligence testing.
https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/NewmanLoftus_Ebbinghaus_EJOP12.pdf?uniq=-mksps4
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Ebbinghaus/memory1.htm
http://www.freetopessays.com/content/hermann-ebbinghaus-memory-man
I decided to do my research on Hermann Ebbinghaus because he all around just seemed interesting and partially I wanted to know if his memory tests that the book presented have any connection with the time addition/subtraction or multiplication/division timed sheets I had to do in elementary school; because if there is I’m going to officially blame him for my lack of excellence in math and then forever curse his name when I’m faced with a math problem.
Mr. Ebbinghaus, which I’m glad I get to write about him and verbally, talk about him because there’s no way I could say that name, was a native born German who was born in 1850, at the young age of 23 he was actually granted his Doctorates in Philosophy from the University of Bonn. One thing that I noticed was that he was very educated in not only research and experimentations but writing; this just stuck out to me because in my careers class we talked about how with a psychology degree you actually do acquire many more talents such as writing and things of at that nature, then if we were taking a specific major such as accounting. It just made me think back to that time and wonder if that’s why being a psychology major can be a desired set of social and personal skills.
When I was reading about Ebbinghaus and his research on human memory I found myself wondering since he used the tactic of the stimuli he devised to be tested being unfamiliar to the subjects, was that a introduction to a blind or double blind experiment; or perhaps that form of experiment had already been done. Given the fact that Ebbinghaus used himself for his own experiments regarding the nonsense syllables, which seemed to be a very repetitive and mentally exhausting task, I found myself wondering how he didn’t go insane or just decide that he didn’t want to do this anymore, I mean ultimately he didn’t know what would come out of such an experiment and given that you’re the guinea pig I think I would get pretty annoyed. I do find his experiments especially on the syllables study to be very important, but to me I find there to be a bigger picture. Sure he’s just measuring our reaction time and memory but in today’s world it’s so easy to sit back and over look just exactly what he was accomplishing. He opened up ideas about the human brain and how it works, why we remember certain things and how are we able to do that but more importantly why can the human mind ( and animals) remember certain information but not seem to be able to retain other information. What makes information A different than information B, which leads into the questions and findings of why do different people remember different things if we all have the same structured brain, what makes my brain function differently than someone else’s.
Branching off of Ebbinghaus’s nonsense syllables and looking at his forgetting curve, which showed that information is usually lost rather quickly right after it is learned depending on different factors such as when it was learned or how the information was learned. More importantly this curve shows us that the information we learn doesn’t just all together disappear but rather it’s permanently stored somewhere; now the real question is how our brain accesses that information. I tend to think of this process or whatever you may call it, to be our unconscious mind that’s triggered by a que in our environment; or sometimes I think it’s just our brain telling us that no matter what we do it is ultimately in charge of our being. But I think Ebbinhaus had a good point here, why do we forget certain information and is that information really forgotten and can forgetting something only be a negative thing or can it be positive. After reading many websites about Ebbinhaus I think my brain was going frantic thinking of so many different concepts about the mind and asking myself far too many, ‘why’ questions, but in the end I would rather have an over active mind then one that just wanted to forget any information brought to it.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Ebbinghaus.htm
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Ebbinghaus/wozniak.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/p/forgetting.htm
The topic that really was interesting for me was the section on Fechner's elements of psychophysics. I found the concepts that he was presenting to be very intriguing. One part I found really interesting was the concept of subjective equality. This part really lead me to want to research more on this topic. This topic fits into the chapter because, like many others, it is a new form of thought. No one had the drive to think and conduct experiments on thresholds . Fechner, and others, were breaking new ground in new fields. They laid the framework for which we could build on. These concepts are very interesting because they deal with our senses and the processes involved.
The sources I found did a good job in explaining more about psychophysics, where as the book talked more about Fechner. Simply put, psychophysics is the study of our senses and the stimuli that elicit them. Fechner broke new ground when he applied Weber's law to sensations and stimuli. I think it is crazy how our sensations work and the tricks they can play on us. The thresholds that he created help create things such as hearing and seeing tests. This new form of science was very helpful. Psychophyics deals with how we see colors on a spectrum and other mysteries with the senses. The more that we know about our senses, the more we can do to be efficient and treat different impairments correctly. Some examples of psychophysics is when you are asked to tell us if the two lines are equal. They look like they are but in reality they are not. These tests are a product of psychophysics. This would be an example of how psychophysics aims to test the limits of our senses.
terms: elicit, senses, psychophysics, Fechner, subjective equality, thresholds, methods, spectrum's, impairment
http://hua.umf.maine.edu/psychology/psychophysics.html
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/part-viii-gabac-receptors/psychophysics-of-vision/
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/481801/psychophysics
The topic I choice to talk about for this Thursdays blog is that of short and long term memory. This topic fits into this chapter quite nicely with that of Herman Ebbinghaus. From reading about Fechner’s scientific approach on the mind and its sensations, he explored more. The question he came up with was if sensations could be measured why not something else, and the something came to association. In order to measure the relationship between our experience and our memories, Ebbinghaus knew that the materials he used would have to be unfamiliar. If he were to use meaningful materials for memorization the problem would be that they already carry meaningful associations that could affect how they could be learned. So he came up with nonsense syllables, a set of three-letter units comprised of two consonants with a vowel in the middle, something that would have no meaningful relation. It was from this that he later came up with the idea of short and long term memory. I have always been interested in the memory process ever since high school going over the basics. Just last year going over the material again but in more detail, it’s just fascinating on how things can work even thou they may seem completely different. Also the tools and techniques that we can use to relay something to memory.
To start things off the basic pattern that our memory follows is encoded, short term, and then long term memory. The first as I stated is the encoding process were information is, as the word says, encoded or altered in a way that the brain is able to read the information we are gathering but only lasting a few seconds before moving on to the short term memory. Short term memory also known as the “working memory” is in constant use taking in and processing all the information that we are currently using. That information be coming from the long term memory or from recently obtained information, but it has its limitations of only holding small amounts of information for only a short time. This is due to new info pushing out the recent but still old info. The way we convert this information in the short term to long term is done in one of two ways, that I’m going to talk about. The first way is simply to rehearse the information without interruptions and the second way is to group things together with things we are already familiar with or by forming a pattern. This is a process known as chunking, allowing more information to be stored with easier references for recall on a later day, essentially becoming part of the long term memory.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=experts-short-term-memory-to-long-term
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TausqSK9p9k
http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2011/01/28/test-your-short-term-memory-how-many-letters-can-you-memorized/
This last link website has a link to a memory test that I found and thought it would be fun to take.
I found Ebbinghaus’s studies on memory and forgetting to be one of the most interesting things discussed in chapter four, especially his study on nonsense syllables. Ebbinghaus fits into the chapter because he was the first person to use experimental design to study memory. I found this topic most interesting because I find memory and the brains ability to memorize times to be an incredible phenomenon in human life. I find the ability to remember something to be very incredible, and learning about the history of how humans began to understand the brains ability to remember interesting as well.
Ebbinghaus was the first to experiment and investigate properties of the human memory. He believed that in order for a memory to be committed to the mind, new associations must be formed through means of repetition. To test this theory, Ebbinghaus compiled a list of nonsense syllables, non-word letter combinations that had no previous associate of meaning. He chose to use nonsense syllables because these words had no previous memory or experience. These nonsense syllables were composed of three letters in the pattern of constant-vowel-constant. When the list was formed, Ebbinghaus memorized the list using repetition: repeating the list over and over to himself. He then spent time recalling the list in two different forms: free recall or serial recall. Free recall is attempting to recall the list items with the order not being important. Serial recall is attempting to recall the list items in the order studied. Alongside recall, Ebbinghaus was also concerned with recollection, the ability to recognize the nonsense syllables that had been listed. Recollection is more sensitive than recall, for an individual may recollect an item on the list but not be able to recall it. After Ebbinghaus was able to recall each list, he waited an allotted amount of various time before testing his memory of the list again. This he called test retention. Ebbinghaus found that forgetting tended to occur most rapidly after the practice ended, and that the rate of forgetting slowed as time when one. This he called the forgetting curve.
http://www.intropsych.com/ch06_memory/ebbinghaus.html
This website had a brief overview of Ebbinghaus's study on nonsense syllables. I used the information pertaining to the explanation of the nonsense syllables from this website.
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/Ebbinghaus.html
This website had a lot of great information that was very helpful and very understanding. It gave a great explanation of the overview of Ebbinghaus's experiment, going into more detail than the book had. I used this website for the majority of the blog, especially the explanation of the experiment itself.
http://www.uamont.edu/facultyweb/brown/PSY3413/Chapter7.pdf
I used this powerpoint from a class at the University of Indiana because it had some great points to contribute to the information I had found on other websites.
What I would like to discuss about chapter four is Wilhelm Wundt. As I mentioned in my last post, he is a very interesting person and someone that I would like to explore further.
Wilhelm Wundt is known most famously for being the father of Experimental Psychology and leading a heavy separation between Philosophy and Psychology. In 1879 he opened the Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. This would be the first laboratory dedicated to psychology. The opening is also seen as the beginning of modern psychology. Using this laboratory and being the first person to ever call himself a psychologist, Wundt used his new laboratory to explore the nature of religious beliefs, identify mental disorders and abnormal behavior, and find damaged parts of the brain. Doing these experiments really helped to establish psychology as a science of it's own, which led him to form the first journal of psychology in 1881.
before founding the laboratory Wilhelm Wundt started as an assistant professor at Heidelberg, Germany and later started a course he called "physiological psychology" which focused on the border of physiology and psychology; mainly on the reactions and senses. His lecture notes later became the outline for his work, The Principles of Physiological Psychology, published in 1873 and 1874.
Throughout the beginning of his career, Wundt followed heavily in the footsteps of Fechner and believed that in the idea of psychophysical parallelism. Psychophysical parallelism is a theory in which every mental physical even has a mental counterpart and every mental event has a physical counterpart. Wundt also pursued the idea that the availability of measurable stimuli could make psychological events open to something like experimental methodology in a way that people, such as Kant, thought was impossible.
Throughout his career he focused mostly on experiments in which he could control and measure the objects. He also used recorded thought and sensations in order to analyze their constituent elements. This was seen as similar to how chemists analyze chemical compounds. Soon his ideas became known as structuralism.
Wundt also had a strong idea and theory of introspection. Introspection was a tool that could be used by studying the conscious mental states using a highly practiced form of self-examination. Introspection was taught to many of Wundt's students although it became reputable for being very bias on personal experience and wasn't used much after the 1920s.
Wilhelm Wundt is also strongly noted for his heavy experimental emphasis on thoughts, images, and feelings. These are now things that are associated with Cognitive Psychology.
Over his lifetime, Wundt was also a very well-known teacher. He had many students, notably Titchener, who worked in Wundt's lab for two years. Titchener would go on to focus on the internal structures of the ming. Although his ideas would be rejected in the mid-1900s once Wundt's work was under fire from behaviorists following the ideas of B.F. Skinner.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
I believe this site has a lot of valid information as usually do .org sites.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/
Not only was this site an .edu site which denotes validity but it was easily read and understood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wundt
I normally stay far away from wikipedia, however, this site's information seemed to be very correct when compared to the other sites and had a lot of useful information.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/wundtjames.html
This site had a lot of understandable research that Wundt did.
My blog fits heavily into the chapter because of how much Wundt's accomplishments were a part of the history of psychology. Also, he was noted very often for his ideas, experiments, and hypotheses in the chapter.
Bre Gibbs
In chapter 4 it talks about a man named Hermann Ebbinghaus. He was a german philosopher. Hermann was born January 24, 1850 in Barman Germany. Hermann was the son of a wealthy Lutheran Merchant named Carl Ebbinghaus. At the age of 17 he attended the University of Bonn. There he planned to study history and philology. It was not until later attending the college that he became interested in philosophy. In 1870, his studies were interrupted when he went to the army during the Franco-Prussian War. Hermann served for the Prussians. After the war, Herman finished a dissertation on the Philosophy of the Unconscious and received his doctorate on August 16, 1873. He was only 23 years old.
After Hermann got his PhD, he moved to England and France. During this time he tutored students to support himself. In England he also taught at two small schools. When Ebbinghaus was in London he came across a book store that served used books. In chapter 4 it talks about him reading a book from Gustav Fechner about the Elements of Psychophysics. It was in this book store where he found the book. It was the work from Gustav Fechner that sparked his interest in running a memory test. He found a 3rd psychological testing lab in Germany. He began his memory studies here in 1879. In 1885 he published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. During this time he was also a professor at the University of Berlin. In 1890, he founded the Psychological journal called The Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs. In 1894, he was demoted as professor due to his lack of publications. It was after this that Ebbinghaus left the University of Berlin and went to the University of Breslau. It was here that he worked on a commission that studied how children’s mental ability declined during the school day. The information he came up with during this study have been lost. His memory work laid the groundwork for future intelligence testing. It was also at Breslau that he founded a psychological testing laboratory. Ebbinghaus spent a considerable amount of time not only in the laboratory but also searched for ways to get funding and support for his research. In 1902 he published the Fundamentals of Psychology. His last outline before he died was the Outline of Psychology.
Ebbinghaus died from pneumonia on February 26, 1909. He was only sixty years old. Hermann died in Halle, Germany.
http://en.m.wikipedia./wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus#section_3
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Ebbinghaus.htm
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/ebbinghaus.shtml
For this assignment, I want to research The Just-noticable difference, which is usually abbreviated as the "jnr". While the theory is typically attributed to Weber, It's Gustav Fechner also proposed a similar theory, so it's sometimes also called the Weber-Fechner law. This is another example of multiples in the study of history of psychology!
While the book outlined the formula for jnr, there are many applications of the theory that are used in modern times. In industrial organizational psychology and marketing, for example, it is used to help sales. The just noticeable difference is used for two main reasons- so that negative changes aren't noticeable, and that positive changes are noticeable. In this way, a very basic idea for what consumers want is applied scientifically to maximize profit for the company. The company might reduce the size or quality of a product, or increase the price, but if it is not a noticeable difference to the consumer, it will have no effect on their sales. Similarly, positive improvements, like increase in size or quality and lower prices must be apparent to customers so that they are pleased with the increase, but not be so lavish that they cost too much for the company. Both applications of the just noticeable difference allow for companies to maximize profit- the bad goes unnoticed and the good goes noticed.
There are a lot of ethics questions raised with topics in industrial organizational psychology and marketing, as it essentially functions on deception and the weaknesses of our perceptions. The problem is that companies reduce the quality of product X, and are so pleased with the effectiveness of cost control that they do it again and again until the difference IS noticeable. At this point, consumers don't want the product because 1) it's not as effective, large, or cheap and 2) they are upset with the company for lowering its standards. In other words, they see the game the marketers are playing. This can be a dangerous game for companies to play, but if they are going to play it, they better be sure that consumers will not be able to get their hands on the original product. If consumers compare the original product with the derivative product, the JNR will be detectable and the company's sales and reputation will suffer.
In marketing and otherwise, the just-noticeable difference's formula relies on both the constant and the intensity. The constant varies between different kinds of stimuli, from saltiness to loudness to pitch. While we have a small constant for pitch, loudness and saltiness have larger constants. This means that we have finer-tuned abilities to judge slight differences in pitch than we do loudness and saltiness. If someone is just a little off key, we are more apt to perceive it than if something were just as much ''too salty''. Companies must be aware of both the variance among constants and the intensity of the product in order to successfully apply the theory. If their product is only slightly out of tune, they are more likely to get in trouble with their consumers than if their saltine crackers are not quite as salty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-noticeable_difference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpLPyUDRLSM
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=e4887546-b85a-4a0e-8da6-25b969d6bf19%40sessionmgr11&vid=6&hid=11
TB CH 4
Hermann Ebbinghaus was a great expirimental psychologist of the 19th centrury. His use of nonsense syllables to study the formation of serial learning was significantly ahead of its times. Ebbinghaus' section in Chapter 4 caused me to have several run off thoughts while reading. I am interested in Alzheimer's disease so Ebbinghaus' work made me wonder if any of these basic concepts could be applied here to what we know of Alzheimer's.
Many people can tell you that Alzheimer's is a disease that makes people forget things. However, from this persepctive you are missing out on important facts and dimensions of the disease. When most people think of the term "forgetting things" they think about being unable to recall what they had for breakfast or what the defintion of structuralism is. However, when someone is affected by Alzheimer's disease their "forgetfulness" is much more different than that.
Their memories regress back into time, so if a person is suffering with alzheimer's at the age of, lets say 75, they may think that they are actually 30. This is why it is very common for elderly women to confuse babies for their own children-- their memory has them in a time warp and their reality as them at early parenthood age. Thinking a bit abstractly, I compared this to Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve. He states that the longer you go without practing something learned, the less of it you are going to remember, and I think most of us would agree for this to be of fact. But in the case of Alzheimer's patients, the more time that has passed without experiencing something (like being a mother) the more likely they are going to remember something from their more recent life (retirement). Ebbinghaus' work focused more on the memorization of words rather than on ecological memory (memory for more realistic everyday events rather than on abstract lists). It was honorable to find a a 19th centrury discovery so relevent to today's science and medical advancement challenges.
http://www.brightfocus.org/alzheimers/about/understanding/history.html
Here, I got background facts about Alzheimer's
http://www.nia.nih.gov/health
Here I got information about the forgetfulness that is common in normal aging-to compare
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11536347
this was research done about ecological memory strenghening procedures
I planned on researching Hermann Ebbinghaus for this assignment. However, I decided to change my topic just because so many other people have written on him and I feel like I already understand the basics about him now.
I decided to take on a new challenge. This challenge was to wrap my mind around Wundt and Titchener's theories. Titchener was Wundt's student, and translated many of Wundt's writings into English. Titchener believed in Structuralism. He believed in only studying observable events, which is funny because structuralists didn't really get along with behaviorists, even though they basically had the same ideology.
Titchener used the method of Introspection, which he got from Wundt. This method has been highly criticized, especially by behaviorists. This is because introspection is extremely subjective, and therefore is dependent on the researcher.
Many people believed that Wundt originally came up with the idea of Structuralism, but this is actually because Titchener mis-translated Wundt's work from German to English. Originally Wundt supported Voluntarism, but the translated version looked an awful lot like Structuralism. Coincidentally, Titchener's translation of Wundt's work happened to completely support Titchener's theories. That is extremely relevant to what we talked about in class, because history is not just a perfect photograph of a certain time period. It is subjective. Translation between languages is the same way. No matter how hard Google tries, they can't always perfectly translate words. Humorously, Titchener's plan backfired. He wanted to make people think that Wundt supported Titchener's theory; but what happened is that he made people think that Wundt came up with the theory himself.
It is also interesting to know that psychology was brought to the United States and translated by many people who all had their own agendas. The things that we know today are based only on what the translators wanted us to know, and perhaps if they translated just a bit more accurately we would be leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now in research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism_%28psychology%29
This article explained what Structuralism is. I found it extremely complex, and plagued with philosophy instead of being purely psychological
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntarism_%28metaphysics%29
This article is about what Wundt believed. It was difficult to understand, but I used it as a reference point to see how it differs from Structuralism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_B._Titchener
This one talks all about Titchener's life, and shows how he was influenced by Wundt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wundt#Wundt.27s_work_and_influence_on_modern_psychology
I vaguely used this as a resource for a bit of background information
The topic that I found most relatable to my interest is Germany and its impact on the development of psychology. It fits in to the chapter by being the first place that psychology came about. The chapter was filled with details and interesting research by intelligent psychologists, however, I could not stop questioning Germany and its impact on psychology. I have had the chance to live in Germany twice throughout my college career and spent both those times being absent minded about the psychology aspect in Europe. I will be living there this summer again, therefore, now seemed to be a good time to become knowledgeable. I want to learn why it begun in Germany, what historical information is still around in Europe, and when did it transform to America being the site for psychological study. I also want to know if there were any aspects about psychology that would have been different if it were founded somewhere else.
Wilhelm Wundt began the exploration of experimental psychology in Leipzig in 1876, and this is when Germany became known for the use of science. His publications and the world’s first psychological lab was one of the many beginnings of psychology in Germany. Our text states that Europe established a free setting of study and that is what brought the American, Russian, and German scientists to Germany. Around the early 1880’s is when psychology was brought to America by a social psychologist of the name Stanley Hall. His development of the American Psychological Association brought followers to America. They could then continue at the first lab in America at John Hopkins. However, some psychologists remained in Europe for a period of time. After reading over a few sites to find more information I continuously thought about the quote from our text, “ Psychology has a long past but a short history.” There is so much information and each sights like our texts goes off in tangents. I found it interesting that not many web sites brought in Fleecher. I also learned that not only experimental psychology was born in Germany, and almost all areas of psychology started in Europe. The final bit of information I looked up was a study, and I couldn’t get the link to work, but it is full of information. The study includes the history of Germany and how it influenced the development of psychology. Germany has such a rich history, and I am interested in everything I have learned from my visits, but this study showed me an entire new side of the history. The government was very active in the allowance of psychological study, and the diverse situations each contained a small affect on psychology. The restoration of the Berlin Republic was one of the main events that had an impact on psychology. They began quite about the psychological findings, and then basically when Germany got it’s government back in line they elaborated and enjoyed the attention it brought. Like stated in class most of the first studies were written in German, and they had an amount of power on how they relayed all information to other countries. The study is full of information, but in conclusion I learned about how much psychology was had an impact on by the history of Europe. And to say the least my next time in Berlin will be much different than the past two. I also will be visiting Vienna to see Freud lab!
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/f/first-psychology-lab.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/psychistory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychology
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207590143000199#preview
I chose to learn more about imageless thought. I found the information in the book interesting, but I thought it could be explained a little more thoroughly if I searched it on the internet. As I assumed I was able to find some more background information on this concept. I am interested in how the idea of imageless thought came to be a psychological concept. It is amazing how someone could look at experiments, and draw conclusions to something that has never been discovered before. I believe that the combination of psychology and philosophy is an excellent match, that helps for psychological scientists to think with reason to answer important questions about the way we think and the behaviors we act with.
At first it was believed that all thoughts were related to sensations that could be received internally from the external senses. Although this is what was believed it was not long after they began doing experiments that they noticed ideas and thoughts coming from the subjects that showed their was no correlation with sensory stimuli. One they could tell if something was imageless thought was if the subject could not explain a thought with a sensory image.
As this idea of imageless thought spread, their were, like usual, two different sides. One side believed it was not possible for imageless thoughts to exist, and the other side believed that imageless thoughts had to exist in order to explain the thought processes. Later on with this process researchers studying the works of both sides were able to realize that both sides had provided examples of imageless thought, and that they were arguing over how the data over imageless thought should be interpreted. The fact that the subjects did not need to use any image components to distinguish an idea in their head is incredible, and before reading the section in the book about this I had never hear about this concept. I am glad I looked up more information on imageless thought because I learned a lot about the process that was taken to come up with the conclusion about imageless thought.
The ideas of imageless thoughts fascinate me, because of how much critical thinking had to have gone into the concept. I wish I knew the thoughts that the different researchers were thinking when they came to this conclusion. I am glad to be able to read in a history book and online, about the different research studies that led up to the concept of imageless thought. I think it would be interesting to be able to see what the research was like back then, and how the processes were done.
http://philosophyofbrains.com/2006/12/03/imageless-thought.aspx
This site discussed the argument between two groups that disagreed about imageless thought.
http://dofocusing.com/infofoc/imageless.htm
This site discussed background information on imagless thoughts.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/
This site discussed the basic inforamation and definition of imageless thought.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2012049
This site provided some background and research info.
The thing that interested me most when reading chapter 5 was the just noticeable difference section. Weber created this law to justify that there was a jnd of different sensory modalities such as light, length, light, along with many others. Weber did experiments to discover the jnd in many of these modalities and made up his own equation. I was curious to find out more about the jnd experiments that Weber conducted, and maybe some flaws to his methods that came up. Also, I am always curious to find out what his experiments lead in the future of psychology.
Like I said earlier, Weber, created these experiments to discover the jnd, but the book never went into much detail which is why I wanted to research more into the topic. In the book it just discussed one experiment that Weber did, and that was the weight experiment. I was lead to believe that was the only experiment that went on. Turns ou that I was way wrong. Weber conducted studies on light, length, weight, and many other things trying to find the jnd in everything that was a sensory modality. The equation that he used was delta divided by I divided by I. The I stands for the initial stimuli in the experiment. Just like we talked about in class, the equation is not that important in understanding the concept, but it allows the experiment to be measureable. I was able to conduct my own experiment with this website and it was a fun experience. It allowed me hands on experinece with the law. Turns out that was jnd occured pretty accurate for high, medium, and low frequency(about 50% of the time).
I got a great example of jnd as I watched a video from the University of Florida. The man went on to describe what jnd was, and it is the stimuli that it takes to detect the difference in somehthing such as weight or sound. The man aslo gave the equation to Webers jnd law and gave a great example that made it more real life for me as a learner. He said that if a person was watching tv and someone told them to turn it down, how far would you have to turn it down to reach the jnd. He earlier provided the consinent for pitch and it was .10. The example was that if someone were listening to the tv at 40 volume then the you would times (.10)*40=4. This was cool because now I can just do the equation in my head the next time a roommate yells at me to turn the tv down. Also, I can apply this to my everday life because there was also an example for not only pitch, but saltiness, and something else relavent.
As I researched further I began to notice that the jnd was more scientific that I imagined. I did not quite understand that the equation played such a big deal into the study. As we talked in class I did not get the being able to quatify that data part, but now I realize what a big deal it plays. Being able to quatify data is what makes psychology a science. In this atricle I was reading it seemed to be all about different equations and different experiments that weber conducted and then used that information to see his findings. I am slowly staring to wrap my mind around the fact the psychology is a science, and in order to be a science than you need data. Since jnd is such a small topic in the psychology field it was hard to find a bunch of information on it and not just a bunch of studies. I found out a lot from the experiments and studies, but never much information on the background of jnd. I think the book did the best job of describing that to me, better than any website that I found.
http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/faculty/montag/vandplite/pages/chap_3/ch3p1.html
This site told me about Webers law and gave me the equation to jnd. Also, it gave me a few examples of how to find jnd.
http://www.phy.davidson.edu/fachome/dmb/soundrm/jnd/jnd.html
This was a youtube video that gave me a visual perspective of jnd. It was very useful in my learning of the subject because I got a real world example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpLPyUDRLSM
This site was a bunch of equation and experiments that were conducted to prove jnd. Like I said earlier it was hard to find information that was not just a bunch of experiments, but I also learned a lot from this website.
I chose to research more about Hermann Ebbinghaus and his forgetting curve. This fits into the chapter because retrieving memory is a function of the mind and often questioned why we remember what we remember. I chose to further research the forgetting curve because when asked to recall in class what I found interesting about this chapter, I drew a blank. I could not remember what I had read so now I’m looking into why Hermann Ebbinghaus says why that might be.
In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus did an experiment testing how long someone could remember nonsense words or nonsense syllables. These nonsense syllables consisted of a consonant, vowel and a consonant, CVC. Ebbinghaus found that the more you repeated the made up words, the more likely you were to remember them. This brought about a learning curve. To oppose the learning curve he tested how long it would take him to forget what he just remember. This was called the forgetting curve. This forgetting curve is pretty steep meaning we are likely to forget what we have just memorized soon after it is memorized. Only sixty percent of what we have just learned is saved just a half an hour after we have learned it. One reason why we forget might be that we are already distracted while we are learning new information.
Though we are easy to forget, there are ways that we remember. To recall information is just to remember what you have learned. There are two kinds of recall, serial recall and free recall. Free recall is trying to remember a list of items not in any particular order. Serial recall is trying to remember something in the order it was studied. Recollection is not exactly remembering. Recollection is just recognizing something that you have learned.
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/Ebbinghaus.html
I chose this site because I thought it gave additional information about recalling and remembering ifromation along with information about the forgetting curve.
http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/the-ebbinghaus-curve-of-forgetting
I chose this site because of it's graphics. The picture were easy to understand and were helpful in relation to the material.
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/p/forgetting.htm
I liked this site because it really simplified the information I was researching. It made a great foundation to build from when looking for other sites.
After reading chapter four the topic or person I was interested in would have to have been Hermann Ebbinghaus. The reason I found Ebbinghaus interesting was because I enjoyed reading about his theories on memory and forgetting and how he did experiments to test out these theories. The reason that Ebbinghaus fits into this chapter is because this chapter primarily focuses on the experimental physiology that was combined with philosophical inquiry in order to make an experimental psychology in Germany. People like Ebbinghaus fit in with a group of people who did experiments to help make sense of physiological ideas that could later, through experimentation, be worked into a psychological field.
An interesting part of study that Ebbinghaus worked on was that of memory and how higher mental processes could be studied by using experimentation. Thanks to Wilhelm Wundt, experimentation seemed to be all the craze with psychologists in Germany. In order to test memory Ebbinghaus used something called “non-sense syllables” which were easily formable associations with regular words, but which had no prior cognitive recognition. Ebbinghaus took a total of 2,300 syllables and then randomly pull them out of a box and try to memorize them. What Ebbinghaus got from this was that people, even though they had no prior knowledge of some non-sense syllables, would attempt to impose meaning on these syllables to make them more meaningful and easier to remember.
Along with his work on memory Ebbinghaus stumbled upon some work on forgetting and came up with the term the forgetting curve. The forgetting curve was a scale of how, with time, we forgot information that we had learned. The significant point of the forgetting curve was that forgetting usually levels off after about a day and decaying in learning is the sharpest in the first twenty minutes and has a significant decay throughout the first hour. This can also be related to a learning curve that was proposed by Ebbinghaus. The learning curve is kind of the same as the forgetting curve but it measures how long it takes for someone to learn information and retain it. This just showed that more repetition was related to longer retention in memory.
Another thing that Ebbinghaus discovered was called the spacing effect. The spacing effect is an effect that refers to you being able to retain information more easily and more effectively if you space it out over time rather than cramming it all in at one time. This is just proof that it is better to study small bits of information over a space of time rather than a bunch of information in a small space of time will help you retain it better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSFqWtD3L7Y – Good examples of the memory recognition with non-sense syllables.
http://www.flashcardlearner.com/articles/the-spacing-effect/ - Used for the spacing effect information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus - Used for background information on different memory discoveries by Ebbinghaus
I was interested in Fechner’s Materialism, Tagesansicht and Nachtansicht, I found theses resources:
http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~psycho/wundt/opera/fechner/tagnacht/TagNa01.htm
http://people.bethel.edu/~johluc/history-resource/fechner.html
http://www.semiophysics.com/SemioPhysics_Articles_risk_3.html
I was fascinated by Fechner’s attempt to explain the relationship between the body and the mind; more specifically I am interested in his writings on materialism, tagesansicht (day view) and nachtansicht (night view). I read that materialism was a view that everything in the universe could be thought of as physical or chemical and could eventually die out, but Fechner considered that to be false and referred to materialism as “night view”. Fechner wanted to present a theory of the body and mind as together but separate (like two side of a coin). He called that the “day view”. While the materialist body could end, the mind is spiritual and lives on. I am interested in his ideas because I have also devoted a lot of time and energy contemplating the forces in the brain which function at a higher level and allows us to reason. When we consider how remarkable the brain is, then it might not be too difficult to assign some form of immortality to it. I believe that Fechner was trying to do just that. Some of Fechner’s writings were spent describing a more spiritual side to the mind, a side which outlasts the biodegradable body and merges into a collective of conscious minds – life forces mixing together in cloud-like state.
Psychology was emerging as a science at that time, and Fechner was mixing science with spiritualism. I think that Fechner wanted to discover a way to explain what would happen to the mind after the material body is gone. Many of his scientific colleagues probably did not want to consider the spiritual aspect of the mind because such a theory is not testable – and science deals with provable facts, not fantasies. As a result, most of Fechner’s writings which discuss his ideas about the cosmic, immortal mind are only available in German because no one has taken the time to translate those works.
I read that Fechner was suffering a temporary blindness and may have sunk into a deep depression. He spent three years in a darkened room contemplating his fate. His mind had plenty of time to entertain ideas of a cosmic reality and life after death. I am not sure he was considering a theological existence; I believe he was just trying to decide what really happens to this remarkable life force when we die. If matter is constant, then would it stand to reason that the particles which constitute our being are inextinguishable? Certainly, this is not falsifiable because there would be no way to test it. People with near death experiences are studied more as curious cases of mind gone wild and not as a living proof of life after death.
Fechner stayed was in self-imposed isolation, but he wrote that he had spent time in transcendental-like state visualizing the gardens outside and other experiences in his mind as if they were real. The mind is fascinating because it can create a whole world within itself, a mini-universe. When a person is not satisfied with his reality, then he can (consciously or unconsciously) create an alternate reality - we call this either daydreaming (when one is aware) or insanity (when one is unaware). We hear people tell about their out of body experiences and “traveling to the light” when they have had near death experiences. Were these people merging with the cosmic forces that Fechner wrote about? Were their minds creating a mini-universe in the face of their own extinction? Were they just bored while waiting to be revived? Were the near-death experiences a form of self-entertainment brought about by dopamine and other natural chemicals in the body?
I think that Fechner wanted to understand the life forces which spark our intellect and make us rational (or irrational) beings. Religion attempts to answer that for many people, but I do not believe that Fechner was trying to convert anyone to a religious way of thinking. I believe that he was trying to find a reasonable and scientific explanation for a theory about the possibility of the mind’s immortal existence in our universe.
The topic from chapter five that I found most interesting and wanted to do more research on was Ebbinghaus’s nonsense syllables and serial learning.
Ebbinghaus created over 2,300 nonsense three letter syllables and used himself as a subject for memory tests using these nonsense “words.” Ebbinghaus himself recognized that this system was not perfect for multiple reasons. Ebbinghaus noticed that some of the syllables were easier to remember than others. Further research has been done, and scientists have found that syllables that follow the “phonetic and orthographic rules” of the language most familiar to the subject. For example, MES would be more easily remembered by an English speaker than NYQ because the combination of letters in MES is possible and common in the English language, as well as the fact that it is not at all common in the English language for a word to end in the letter Q.
Another problem with Ebbinghaus’s research was that he spent so much time working with the nonsense syllables that even though there were 2,300 of them, he began to get familiar with them. In this, some of them gained meaning to him because of the way the brain makes associations and connections in order to remember things. For example, MES may become associated with the word mess which could bring about other memories which may either help or hinder the serial memory process.
Although Ebbinghaus’s research had its flaws, it laid the groundwork for many decades of research on memory and the way the mind processes information. Serial memory has not been studied much in the last few decades, but it lead to research in the nature of memory organization, the distinction between order and information, the roles of distinctiveness and meaningfulness in retrieval, and much more.
A theory that Ebbinghaus came up with is the Chaining hypothesis. The Chaining Hypothesis is how Ebbinghaus described the process of human serial memory (that is, learning a series of items in an order, telephone numbers for example.) According to the Chaining Hypothesis, a subject forms associations between all of the items on the list. So, the first item forms an association with the second, but also with the third, fourth, and tenth items. The strength of the association, Ebbinghaus believed, is dependent on how close the two items are in the list. Ebbinghaus called these associations between nonadjacent items remote associations. In this sense, recalling the first item would trigger recall of the second item strongly, which would trigger recall of the third item and so on in a sort of chain reaction.
Ebbinghaus used “time saved” as a measure of the ease in learning a new list. “Time saved” refers to the percentage of time it took him to memorize a second list based on the first. He determined that if his idea of remote associations is true, a second list containing the same syllables but in different orders should be more easily recalled. In his studies, he found this to be true, but it has been since debated by many psychologists.
Scientists who studied the work of Ebbinghaus considered this theory and concluded, just as Ebbinghaus did, that if it is true, a new list of the same syllables as an already remembered list should be much easier to remember than a brand new list with new syllables. The also concluded that it should be very easy to remember and recognize pairs from a previously memorized list. Evidence for both of these sub-theories is not strong, suggesting either that the Chaining Hypothesis is incorrect or that it is at least not the whole story behind serial learning. Psychologists have also addressed that associations are also made in the backwards direction. This means that the third item on the list would not only trigger recall of the fourth item, but the second and first as well.
Research does suggest that once a list is learned, a single item on the list will bring to memory the entire list and vice versa. While the research done says all of this is really important, psychologists have found it is also important to take into account the subjects internal cognition and the physical processes involved in memorization. Internal cognitions mean addressing what the subjects thinking when memorizing the lists. Physical processes refer to the processes of physical movement of saying the words. These assist the memory in other ways.
I also did some research on the memory drum invented by Mueller as he tried to expand on Ebbinghaus’s research. Mueller and his lab mates wanted to find a way to present only one item of the list at a time for a very regulated amount of time. The problem they saw with Ebbinghaus’s methods was that, while he did time himself on each word, he was looking at the whole list the entire time. This means that although he was focusing on the single word, he was also seeing the adjacent words. Mueller’s solution was found in a kymograph, an apparatus already in the psychology lab. The kymograph was a way to measure and record physiological activity. It was a cylinder of paper that revolved while a stylist with ink wrote on it. Mueller literally turned this machine on its side and put the list on it. By adding a screen with one hole in it, only one word could be seen at a time. The problem with early models of memory drums was that they were always moving. The constant movement provided a distraction which could also confound the results of the tests. The memory drum was repeatedly revised and remade by many psychologists and is still used in some labs today. Many different kinds of memory drums and the changes throughout the decades can be found in the Archives of the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2009/may-june-09/recalling-psychologys-past-the-memory-drum.html
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=G3sso7FLiV8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA125&dq=ebbinghaus+nonsense+syllables+serial+learning&ots=UeylrDaaOY&sig=cq8ZV3_s-qT7VECHqOzxXf6ajeI#v=onepage&q=ebbinghaus%20nonsense%20syllables%20serial%20learning&f=false
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.uni.edu/stable/pdfplus/1413823.pdf?acceptTC=true
For this assignment I decided to do more research on Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt fits into this chapter because was discussed in this chapter, as well as his theories and approaches. I am interested in Wundt because he was a major contributing factor to psychology and is very well known in the field.
Wundt was born in Baden, Germany in 1832. His father was a Lutheran minister. Wundt studied at the Universities of Tubingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg. He received a degree in medicine from Heidelberg. After graduating, Wundt became an assistant to Hermann Von Helmholtz. It was during this time that he wrote his first book, Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception. Two years later he wrote a textbook on human physiology. After this he was given a position as a professor. His job was to acquaint medical students with the physical needs for medical investigation. Seven years later he was given a position as a professor of inductive psychology in Berlin. He returned to Leipzig in 1875.
In 1874 Wundt wrote Principles of Physiological Psychology. This was the first textbook ever written about psychology. The focus of this book was to investigate the immediate experiences of human consciousness. This was to be done mainly through self-examination.
In 1879 Wundt opened the first laboratory specifically devoted to psychological research. This was at the University of Leipzig. This marked the birth of psychology as an official field of study. Research students conducted experiments assigned by Wundt, and this position attracted many students to the program.
Wundt believed that scientific psychology should focus on human consciousness, which relies on structuralism. Wundt analyzed the mind using introspection. This required him to teach his students to make observations based on past experiences and used the results to develop a view of conscious thought. The use of introspection is considered, by many, to be the reason that structuralism fell out of use. Introspection is now considered an unreliable way of collecting and analyzing data.
Wundt is important in the history of psychology because he separated psychology from philosophy. He did this by researching the mind in a structured way that emphasized objective measurement and control. Laboratories in psychology were modeled for many years after Wundt's own lab. He was the first to focus on controlled conditions, giving each subject the same objects to focus on or tasks to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wundt
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/
http://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
JG
I chose to examine the idea of imageless thought. This idea ties in with the rest of the chapter, in that it is one of many different examples of findings that came out of the Wurzburg School. I was interested in this topic because the concept seemed both intriguing and unlikely to actually occur. When I thought about it, I realized that all of my thoughts and memories were associated with images in my mind. I decided that the subject of imageless thought would be one worth exploring.
Essentially what happened was that Imageless Thought started a controversy resulting in heated debates about who was a careful experimenter, and who was sloppy. The argument began when researchers at Wurzburg asked the question "Why not use controlled introspection on higher mental processes involving thinking and reasoning, rather than simpler processes like perceiving?" These researchers found something very important: In a lot of cases, their subjects reported no imagery whatsoever before becoming aware of the answer! Or to put it another way, there was imageless thought. Something seemed to be going on that didn't involve the three types of mental contents the Structuralists posited. It appeared that thinking could be unconscious. Wundt did not like this theory, and one of his students, Tichener, worked out a theory that reorganized imageless thoughts into sensations, feelings, and images. However, this debate showed that an all introspective approach in experimental psychology would not work, which led to the behaviorist revolution in psychology thereafter.
The idea of Imageless thoughts was able to be explained away to fit in with Wundt's theories. I am not saying that I necessarily agree with the theory of Imageless Thoughts, but this made me wonder how many other ideas or findings in any scientific field have been modified or hidden by the dominant figures in that area of study. I feel as though Wundt and Tichener did not want to submit to someone else having a better theory than they had. I wondered how many other questions and discoveries went unanswered because of the balance of power.
Back to the matter at hand, I think that this debate, regardless of the outcome, was essential to strengthening the science to be more reliable and valid. This debate helped to show that the current methods for research would not suffice, and that changes and modifications were needed. The development of behaviorism, and psychology, greatly benefited because researchers understood that introspective research would not be enough to base theories on.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/
http://dofocusing.com/infofoc/imageless.htm
http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Angell/Angell_1911.html
I found the just noticeable different interesting for this chapter. The just noticeable difference is also known as Weber’s law. It is described as a difference threshold, which is the minimal amount of stimulus change that goes above the threshold and appears different. Imagine you were to hold your hand out and had 3 Skittles in your hand. Someone will be putting more Skittles in your hand but you don’t know that. You have your eyes closed and are asked to say something when the person adds more Skittles to your hand. The first time you respond would show the example of the combined weight of the Skittles passing over the threshold of just noticeable difference. Prior to the most previous Skittle, the weight had changed but you hadn’t noticed.
This change known as just noticeable difference (jnd) is usually observed in magnitude rather than weight so that it is applicable to multiple sensations such as visual perception. Once we start to talk about visual perception, Weber’s law seems to become more obsolete. The smaller the magnitude of change, the more Weber’s law seems to break down and become less accurate and less generalizable. Since Weber’s law becomes less useful with smaller thresholds, people have used Weber’s law to describe bigger events.
Weber’s law or jnd is used a lot in marketing. People in marketing want to slip past human consciousness at times so that they may lightly change a product to fix or modify it. At the same time, if a product such as the iPhone, which has multiple versions, is to come out with something new, they would want their new product to be “new” while also resembling the features of the old product. In other words; people want the new iPhone to be new, but still be an iPhone. This is really tapping into Weber’s law and manipulating it so that marketers can use it how they want.
Aside from marketing, Weber’s law is used to predict change and how it will affect people. Different jobs will use his formula with many situations to guess how people will react or if they will even react. The formula used is (∆I/I = k). ∆I = the difference threshold and I = initial stimuli intensity. k Is a constant.
http://sunburst.usd.edu/~schieber/coglab/WebersLaw.html -Helped explain jnd in examples. This website was used as an example for a class and did very well explaining jnd to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-noticeable_difference - Helped further explain jnd and its relation to marketing and other real-world examples.
http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~msl/courses/0044/handouts/Weber.pdf - An even more in depth description of jnd and its limitations as well as explain the conceptual definition of the formula.
The topic that I decided to do more research on is Wilhelm Wundt. He is a very important figure in psychology; he is considered the “father of experimental psychology.” This chapter is about him so I feel that this topic is pretty relevant. I am interested in learning more about Wundt because I have never heard about him before. I have heard about influential psychologists like Freud and Pavlov who wasn’t even a psychologist but I have never heard about Wundt and he is considered the “father of experimental psychologist.” He was also the first person to call himself a psychologist. He is so influential but not well known which makes me curious.
Wundt opened the Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1879. This was the first laboratory dedicated to psychology, and its opening is usually thought of as the beginning of modern psychology. He was innovative because he separated psychology from philosophy by analyzing the workings of the mind in a more structured way, with the emphasis being an objective measurement and control. With a background in physiology the labs had that kind of focus. He did his research in the same fashion as a chemist does theirs. He would record thoughts and sensations to analyze them into their constituent elements. The same way a chemist analyses chemical compounds. This was called voluntarism; the processing of organizing the mind.
Wundt trained one hundred and eight-six graduate students. One of his most influential students was Edward Titchener. He described Wundt’s system as structuralism or the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. Wundt wanted to study the structure of the human mind. He did that by using introspection. He believed in reductionism which is consciousness could be broken down to its basic elements without sacrificing any of the properties of the whole. Overall Wundt’s experiments were his highly trained assistants were given a stimulus and they would reflect on the experience. His fundamental tool of psychological experimentation didn’t make it past the early 1920’s.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/#TheFraExpPsy
http://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2002/wundt.htm
The topic that I decided to do more research on is Wilhelm Wundt. He is a very important figure in psychology; he is considered the “father of experimental psychology.” This chapter is about him so I feel that this topic is pretty relevant. I am interested in learning more about Wundt because I have never heard about him before. I have heard about influential psychologists like Freud and Pavlov who wasn’t even a psychologist but I have never heard about Wundt and he is considered the “father of experimental psychologist.” He was also the first person to call himself a psychologist. He is so influential but not well known which makes me curious.
Wundt opened the Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1879. This was the first laboratory dedicated to psychology, and its opening is usually thought of as the beginning of modern psychology. He was innovative because he separated psychology from philosophy by analyzing the workings of the mind in a more structured way, with the emphasis being an objective measurement and control. With a background in physiology the labs had that kind of focus. He did his research in the same fashion as a chemist does theirs. He would record thoughts and sensations to analyze them into their constituent elements. The same way a chemist analyses chemical compounds. This was called voluntarism; the processing of organizing the mind.
Wundt trained one hundred and eight-six graduate students. One of his most influential students was Edward Titchener. He described Wundt’s system as structuralism or the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. Wundt wanted to study the structure of the human mind. He did that by using introspection. He believed in reductionism which is consciousness could be broken down to its basic elements without sacrificing any of the properties of the whole. Overall Wundt’s experiments were his highly trained assistants were given a stimulus and they would reflect on the experience. His fundamental tool of psychological experimentation didn’t make it past the early 1920’s.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/#TheFraExpPsy
http://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2002/wundt.htm
1. I wanted to further my research on Johann Herbart, on Mondays assignment I talked about how when it comes to ideas and consciousness everyone kind looks to Freud and its refreshing having someone else also come up with a similar concept. I want to know how he mainly differs from Freud, for example was he into coke too. I want to know what other contributions he had on society outside of psychology.
b) How exactly it fits into the chapter.
So far we have been discussing the concept of why history is important, why we study it. One of the things, that I feel really makes this class is the atmosphere, of reading through history and picking out pieces that individuals find interesting and learning from them. It is a good example of the jigsaw classroom study. This chapter focused on how German education helped American students, further look into the study of psychophysics and how that helped shape the ‘new psychology”. In gathering more information on Johann Herbart, I am understanding all his other research that he has done. That is another aspect the chapter focuses on, how research on sensory threshold, really started to pave the way.
c) Johann Herbart, came up with the concept of Apperceptive Mass, which challenged the idea that Freud holds just consciousness. Apperceptive mass is an interrelated group of ideas at the forefront of consciousness. The example I used before was the one from the book. As you are reading this paragraph, how well you are focusing on the information. Yet the fact that, I mention the weekend, how does that affect you’re processing of the information you are reading. If you are really paying attention, and having good idea strength. Then the talking about the weekend is under your threshold of awareness. When furthering my research, I wanted to know what else he has done. I came across Herbartianism, it is an educational, philosophy movement that is loosely based off of Johann Herbart. It was only after his death, was this movement of ideas expanded on. Pedagogical theories, focuses on education. Herbartinaism is based on Johann Herbart pedagogical method. He divided into five steps: preparation, presentation, association, generalization, and application. In preparation, teachers introduce new material in relation to the students' existing knowledge or interests. Meaning that as t0 pique interest in the new material. As for the, presentation, the new material is shown in a concrete or material fashion. Then the new material is compared with the students' previous knowledge for similarities and differences. so they are able notice the new material's distinction. In generalization, the new material is explored beyond concrete and material traits. Finally in the application, if the students have learned the new material, they apply it towards every day life.
d) This website gave me an overview of his life, and gave me some insight on what other contributions he had on society. http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2040/Herbart-Johann-1776-1841.html
The next website, I found explained his education theory, pedagogical theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy
The last website that I used, gave a better understanding on what Johann Herbert pedagogy is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbartianism