Any

Psych Two Take-Home Essay

The study of Behaviorism dates can be traced back to the classical Greek philosophers,

and goes into the nineteenth and twentieth-century psychology. Below is a list of

fundamental psychologists and their contributions.

* Greeks

Philosophers and psychologists have been intrigued with the human thought process for

thousands of years, with one of the first being the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He

presented some of the first operational methods in how human learning and memory are

formed. He also emphasized the importance of mental imagery.

* Wundt

William Wundt is considered the father of Psychology when he opened his laboratory in

Leipzig, Germany. With this done, Wundt separated the disciplines of philosophy and

physiology and psychology emerged as a new and separate discipline. G. Stanley Hall was

one of Wundt's early students, and was important in that he contributed to psychology's

rapid growth in America.

Hall opened America's first psychological research lab at John Hopkins University in

1883. A few years after that, Hall launched America's first Psychology journal. Finally,

in 1892, he pushed to establish the American Psychological Association (APA), and was

elected as the first president. Today, the APA is the world's largest organization that

strives to further psychological research, and has over 14,000 members.

Wundt also proposed that psychology should study mental processes via a method called

introspection. Introspection is where trained observers would pay careful attention to

their own sensations and try to report them as subjectively as possible. The observers

were encouraged to describe the sensations they felt, rather than the stimuli that

produced it.

Wundt worked hard for fifty years to promote his introspection technique through various

conferences and journals. His techniques have been incorporated into today's research on

cognitive processes. Wundt also emphasized the importance of replications, where the

phenomenon in experiments would be tested under different conditions. Although Wundt's

methods are similar to today's methods in cognitive research, he wrote that introspection

could not investigate higher level mental processes such as thinking, language, and

critical thinking.

On a final note about Wundt and his colleagues, they subscribed to the school of

structuralism, which was based on the belief that the goal of psychology is to analyze

consciousness into basic elements and investigate how these elements relate. The end goal

of structuralists was to identify and examine the fundamental components of living, like

sensations, feelings and images--in a way, an early study of cognition.

* Ebbinghaus/Calkins

Hermann Ebbinghaus was another German psychologist that was around at the time of Wundt,

but he decided not to subscribe to Wundt's philosophy of introspection. He devised his

own methods for studying human memory where he devised over 2000 nonsense syllables and

tested his own ability to learn these stimuli. He devised these nonsense syllables in

order to prevent past experience/knowledge from interfering with the subjects'

performance levels. Ebbinghaus also examined the factors that might influence performance

like the time delay between the lists of presentations.

Meanwhile in America, Mary Whiten Calkins, who was also the first woman to be president

of The American Psychological Association, was also conducting similar experiments in

memory research. Calkins also reported a phenomenon now known as the recency effect,

which referred to recalling items in memory.

These two and others made a bigger impact on cognitive psychology then Wundt did with his

introspective techniques. For example, Ebbinghaus's use of nonsense syllables encouraged

other research psychologists to use meaningless material to study how memory works. Also,

unlike introspection, later researchers conducted experiments in where testing how

selected variables influenced memory rather then to describe and report the sensations

produced by the stimulus.

Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Cognitive Psychology

* William James

A competitor to Wundt's concepts of introspection/structuralism was William James, and

his school of thought, functionalism. Functionalism was based on the belief that

psychology should study the function and purpose of consciousness, instead of its

structure.

While James' formal training was in medicine, he quickly became bored of it, with it

being not intellectually challenging enough. James was highly