How did Wundt develop experimental psychology? - Chapter 5

The German Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) developed a "Thought-meter" to test the assumed assumption that, when two different stimuli reach our senses at the same moment (for example, when we hear someone speak and at the same time see his lips moving), we also become aware of both stimuli at the same time. On page 174 is his 'thought-meter' with an explanation. When Wundt tested himself, he concluded that he had not consciously experienced visual and visual stimuli at the same time, despite the fact that they took place simultaneously. Instead separate moments of attention were needed. Wundt acknowledged that, like Herman Helmholtz and Gustav Fechner, that he now had a clear psychological process subject to experimentally study, while Kant had implied that this was impossible. Wundt therefore suggested that there was sufficient ground for setting up a new field of experimental psychology. This possibility he introduced in his book from 1862, ‘Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception’. He is still seen as the father of modern academic and experimental psychology today.

What did Wundt's life look like?

Wundt was born in a small village in Germany, where his father was a pastor. The family had good academic connections. As a child, Wilhelm got malaria, after which his parents decided to move to Heidelberg, with a healthier climate. He grew up as an only child and was often picked on. Wilhelm was a real daydreamer, and his first year in high school became a complete failure. Wundt's parents sent him to Heidelberg to live with his aunt and brother Ludwig. Here he found more connection with peers. However, he did not receive a scholarship to the University. Under the supervision of his uncle Arnold, professor of anatomy and physiology he did, however, have academic success.

Wundt's first experiment was led by the German chemist Robbert Bunsen (1811- 1899), and in 1854 he won a gold medal from the university for examining the effect of the nervus vagus on the breathing. Years later, Wundt worked as an assistant to Helmholtz. The 'thought-meter' was very similar to Helmholtz's work on the speed of nerve impulses. Astronomers had problems with the reaction speed for years.  According to Helmholtz personal comparisons and differences arise because there are individual differences in the length of a person's sensory and motor nerves, or in the speed in which the nerves send impulses. It is also possible that the differences arise due to the speed of the central processing in the brain. He could demonstrate this with his thought-meter.

Wundt believed that his discovery, that stimuli are first registered in consciousness responded to it, supported the general philosophical tradition of Leibniz. This is a psychology that explains the receptive and creative qualities of the mind itself, beyond the influence of external stimuli in creating 'ideas'. He also believed that the speed of other central processes could be examined by refinements of the reaction time experiments. He called this the study of mental chrono metrics: once the speed of information processing was measured, conclusions about the basal elements of it awareness and other central processes could be made.

He published this idea in 1862 in his book 'Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception'. Yet Wundt did not believe that this was the only method for psychology as a whole. The experimental methods should be limited to the examination of the individual consciousness, because they could not easily be applied to mental processes and because they were originally collective and social in nature. In particular, language as a collective human process seemed to be crucial for all 'higher' mental functions such as thinking and reasoning. Wundt saw these functions as immune to experimental investigation. Therefore he proposed a second and additional branch of psychology, which used comparative and historical methods instead of experiments. This he called the Völker psychology. With this he tried to indicate a kind of non-experimental psychology that engaged in the community and cultural properties of human nature, such as religion, mythology, customs, language and the derived higher processes thereof. 

The three books that Wundt had written so far, were all highly specialized and sold badly. Wundt decided that he had to write to make money, after which he published three popular books that helped him to establish his name in the philosophy field. In 1867, he wrote a response to a recent work on visual spatial perception and mental chronometry and he promised a later work in which he would make a link between physiology and psychology. Among others, William James (1842-1910) became convinced by this. As promised, in his book from 1867, Principles of Physiological Psychology, Wundt described this link between physiology and psychology. Wundt saw that the field of physiology investigates living organisms through external sensations, while psychology investigates phenomena that arises 'from within’ and tries to explain this. To combine this and to investigate processes who are simultaneously accessible to both ways of observation, Wundt proposed a field on 'physiological psychology'. In 1874 he won a professorship in philosophy at the University from Zurich. A year later he got the same position in Leipzig, where he developed the first full study program in experimental psychology.

Wundt started working in Leipzig, where he had a disagreement with Johann Zöllner (1834- 1882). Zollner had also done some research on optical illusions and was a good friend of Fechner. Zöllner became estranged from Wundt after a visit to American spiritualist and medium Henry Slade in 1877. At this time, people believed in the reality of paranormal and dark forces. Zöllner became enthusiastic about the genius of Slade, while Wundt proclaimed that the observed effects only occurred when Slade had the opportunity to cheat. Then they wrote mean articles about each other. 

Despite earlier problems, Wundt established himself well in Leipzig. In 1881, Wundt founded the journal Philosophische Studien. Two years later he threatened with a departure for Breslau, but to keep him, the university of Leipzig gave him a 40% salary increase and a four times larger laboratory. Just for his organizational performance Wundt, could have been given the title of father of experimental psychology but he also played a major role as a developer, supervisor and sometimes as subject in the experiments of his laboratory.

What kind of experimental studies were done in Leipzig?

All early experimental research at Leipzig fell into one of three general areas: physics, examining the sense of time and mental chronometry. The studies into mental chronometry were Wundt’s best subjects. Most of these studies used the subtractive method, a technique originally developed in 1868 by the Dutchman F.C. Donders (1818- 1889). Donders had measured the simple reaction time, in a study where a test subject was to respond as fast as possible to a few visual stimuli. He made this experimental task then more difficult by showing two types of visual stimuli, but the subject is to concentrate on one of the stimuli in particular. This made the reaction time longer, probably because the test subject needed extra time to distinguish one stimulus from the other. This difference, about a tenth of a second, is the time required for a mental action of ‘differentiation’.

James McKeen Cattell was one of the many who built on the work of Donders. He showed great ingenuity in device design. He developed the instrument on page 187 with which various types of visual stimuli can be presented in reaction time studies. This allowed him to determine the response time very accurately and in a broader range more interesting variety of situations than ever before. When a subject had to produce a separate response to a stimulus, for example the moving of the left or right hand, the response time was increased by a further tenth of one second. Wundt thought that this was because the person had to make a voluntary decision to, for example, use the left or right hand and called this 'will-time'. Cattell preferred to the term 'motor time'. He stated that when reading a word, we do not separate the letters we observe, but that we get the word as a whole. Based on other research he suggested that some people generally have faster association times than others. These people would not only think faster, but also experience more ideas in the same time period and possibly also be more intelligent.

In simple perception, someone responds automatically, mechanically and without thinking on one stimuli. In apperception, a person's full attention is focused on the stimulus and is actively recognized, interpreted and thought about. In 1888, Ludwig Lange (1863-1936) compared the simple response times that arise when someone's attention is focused on the expected stimulus, with the response times that are obtained when the attention is focused on the requested response. The reaction times in the first case were about a tenth of a second longer than in the second case. Wundt believed that someone who was only focussed on the stimulus of the condition and gave the expected reaction, was also simple perception. Although this process is very fast, there is also more chance of errors and it can happen that the response is provoked by inappropriate stimuli. Wundt then turned to both theoretical and experimental focus apprehension and finally confirmed Cattell's conclusion.

What is voluntary psychology?

Based on experience, Wundt stated that a maximum of six ideas can be observed at any time in a direct attention, while many other ideas may be sideways and vaguely obtained. In this way, just like the visual focus, attention can also quickly be drawn from one small group and move to another group of ideas. In addition, he also believed that observed ideas and ideas that one obtains through previous experiences are dependent on different kinds of organization and combination rules. Observed ideas organize themselves mechanically and are automatically recorded according to associations that someone has made in the past. Obtained ideas that are based on experience can be combined and organized in many ways. These can also be ways that are not based on previous experiences at all. In the terminology of Wundt, there is a creative synthesis that takes place in the focus of the brain. Wundt pointed out all allegations that suggested that at least some central mental processes that are closely connected to ask for a different way of analysis with consciousness and 'will', such as Descartes and Helmholtz  did. For this he used the concept of clairvoyant causality. He stated that a reaction cannot be predicted. He did not deny the power and usefulness of mechanistic physiology for explaining events that occur at the boundaries of consciousness, but he did think that something more was needed to be able to give a full explanation about that experience yourself. He believed that this 'something' is closely involved in consciously experiencing the 'will' and 'voluntary effort'. He also called this approach the voluntary psychology.

What are the limitations of Völker psychology?

Wundt believed that the most essential characteristics of higher and central mental processes never could be measured by experimental analyses and thus must be studied in a natural way, using historical methods. Wundt tried to do that himself with the Völker psychology. He also suggested that words and thoughts are not exactly the same, because people often have to think about their words. He stated that the most basic unit of thoughts are not the word or another linguistic characteristic, but rather a 'general impression' or a "general idea" that is independent of words. The process of speaking begins with it forming a general idea, followed by an analysis that converts this into linguistic structures that represents the idea more or less adequately. The most fundamental linguistic unit is then not the word, but the sentence (which is the overall structure that somehow 'contains' a general idea). A sentence is therefore a structure that is both 'simultaneous' and 'sequential'.

To investigate the complex and central functions (those that are furthest away from easy to observe senses and motor interactions with the physical world), Wundt trusted on non-experimental techniques and assumed a non-mechanistic clairvoyant causality. Not everyone agreed with this conception of psychology, which led to a debate, in particular on the role of introspection, (observing and reporting one's own subjective inner experiences) in psychological experiments. Wundt saw introspection as the most direct source of much psychological information. He concluded that the contents of consciousness could be conveniently described as ‘composed of combinations of specifiable sensations and feelings’, which in turn can be classified according to basal dimensions. So, he believed that sensations can be categorized in modes (visual, auditory, tactile etc.), qualities (colours and shapes), intensities and duration. He classified feelings according to the three basic dimensions of pleasant-unpleasant, tension-relaxation and active- passive.

But while Wundt saw introspective analysis of consciousness as a useful descriptive tool, he did have two important reservations about it. Firstly, he warned that the introspectively revealed measures of consciousness seemingly are not the same as the chemical elements of consciousness. By this he means the ultimate units that have the opportunity to complex psychological states in the same way that chemical elements are capable of making physical compositions. Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) did not agree and proposed an experimental psychology whose main goal is the atomistic analysis of the elements of consciousness. The second concern about introspective psychology came from the private and not controlled nature of subjective reports and the fact that our memory often tricks the memory of psychological states. Wundt believed that it was not possible for the higher mental processes to be accurate tested. Oswald Külpe (1862-1915) led a number of experiments in which several higher processes were actually approached introspectively. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909 used in Berlin a non-introspective but experimental approach to investigate the memory. Because psychology has recently started to focus a lot on the central cognitive processes, they speak of a return to "Wundtian" ideas. With the current cognitive psychologists who focus on dimensional studies of feeling, emotions and attitude, the language psychology and theories about schizophrenia, he would still feel at home.

What was the structuralism of Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927)?

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) was a British psychologist who was Wundt’s student for years. However, he only adopted part of Wundt's theories and rejected everything that was essential for Wundt's theories. He founded structuralism. He tried to discover the structure of the spirit. He believed that if the basic components of the mind could be defined and categorized, that the higher complex processes could be better investigated as well. He tried to examine what parts the spirit possessed, how they interacted with each other, and why they did what they did. He regarded sensations and thoughts as structures of the ghost. Sensations are characterized on the basis of intensity, quality, duration and size. Each of this characteristic corresponds to a certain characteristic of the stimulus, even though some of the stimuli were not strong enough to bring the property forward. He also placed different types of sensations in multiple categories. For example, he distinguished auditory sensations in 'tones' and 'noises'. 

Ideas and perceptions would also be the result of sensations. He regarded introspection as a rigorous procedure that had to be carefully trained to be able to be executed. ‘Introspectors’ had to break up all their mental processes into the most basic elements. This meant that they were not allowed to give meaning or interpretation to these basic elements either, but that they had to describe them objectively. According to Titchener, attention was only a matter of clarity of the imaginary process, one of the elementary sensory attributions. He interpreted the vague feeling of concentration and effort that accompanies attention as being nothing more than sensations from the immediate frowns, movements, and muscle contractions that take place simultaneously with a thought. Such analyses distorted the nature of the central psychological processes that Wundt saw as much more than just the sum of the convergent elements. Titchener's goal to avoid stimulus-error and get rid of 'meaning' in connection to experiences was completely in contrast to Wundt's general approach to psychology. It also ran counter to the anti-elemental approach that took place around the same time Gestalt psychologists were developed, and in another way against the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud. Freud used the introspective method of "free association" with the intent to uncover the symbolic meaning of ideas. This was therefore complete contrary to removing its meaning. 

Titchener himself did not completely disregard these competitive approaches, but he saw them as examples of functional or applied psychology instead of the experimental, scientific psychology that he practised. Since the structural foundations had yet to be determined, he found these applied attempts premature. In due time, Titchener's structuralism, along with others introspective based perspectives, became under attack of the behaviourist movement.

Did female students have opportunities?

In the early 1980s, women hardly had a chance to study. In New York,  Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939) tried to get accepted into Cattell's course, but was refused by higher authorities. Titchener was open to teaching women and wanted to guide her. Washburn became Titchener's first student. In 1894, Washburn became the first woman with a PhD in Psychology. Titchener's support for women was impressive at the time. He even recommended them for jobs. In the late eighties, Titchener and a number of other experimental psychologists were flabbergasted by the composition and emphasis of the American Psychological Association. They felt that the philosophical and the various applied subjects were dominant, at the expense of the truly experimental science of mind. Titchener therefore decided to have a small group of experimentalists (who were only admitted on his invitation) that would meet once a year to conduct and discuss ongoing investigations, to deal with experimental demonstrations and having free discussions (or conservazione). This would serve to connect younger researchers in the area with each other socialize. However, women were not allowed to participate.

A woman who strongly opposed this policy was Christine Ladd-Franklin. Under influence of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), she became interested in symbolic logic and directed her attention to a long-standing problem that was called the transformation of the syllogism. After she graduated, she worked on an arithmetic question underlying the theory of binocular vision and became interested in theories about colour vision. Based on her scientific credentials, Ladd-Franklin was eventually admitted to the Experimentalists. However, in 1912 she came face to face with Titchener's refusal to recognize the sexism that underpinned his policy. Two years later she was allowed to attend a session, but it was not successful to convince Titchener to reverse his general policy. This did not change until two years after the death of Titchener in 1927. But then they still were only four women admitted: Margaret Floy Washburn, June Etta Downey, Eleanor Gibson, and Dorothea Jameson.

Which experiments were done on higher functions?

Titchener was not the only one who challenged Wundtian psychology. Oswald Külpe (1862-1915) and Hermann Ebbinghaus adapted the ideas of Wundt in a number of ways. Oswald Külpe was a structural psychologist and student and assistant of Wundt. Külpe made important contributions to psychology including the systematic experimental introspection, imageless thoughts, mental sets and abstraction. In 1896, Külpe set up a laboratory at the University of Würzburg. Scientists in Würzburg who used introspection, became aware of the existence of certain specific transitional states, which could not be defined in terms of sensations or feelings. They said they were aware of their own processes that were involved in associating or judging, but that these experiences were intangible and without specifically definable content. 

Külpe believed that there were certain sensations and feelings existence that cannot be described or be associated with a certain image (imageless thoughts). He believed in the existence of a thought process that had no sensation or feeling connected to it. Wundt refused to accept these findings, on the grounds that the experimental conditions were insufficiently checked and because he believed that the mental processes involved were too complex to be reliably retrieved from the memory.

Investigations of direct association by Külpe’s Scottish student Henry J. Watt (1879-1925) and his younger colleague Narziss Ach (1871-1946), gave a more immediate challenge to the experimental psychology of Wundt. Watt's subjects were asked for a very specific association (instead of a free association) with stimulus words. This had to by naming the first higher order and subordinate concepts in mind come up. So with the stimulus word bird, associations like "animal" "creature" and "living thing "suitable for higher order concepts, while" canary "" robin "and" hawk " acceptable subordinate answers. In Ach's experiment, test subjects were shown a set of numbers and were told to either add, subtract, multiply or divide them. So a card with a 4 and a 3 provoked a response of 7, 1, 12 or 1.33, depending on his instructions. This study showed that the subjects easily and with negligible differences in reaction time gave correct answers. And when they are introspective remembered their experiences, they said that the instructions have no further conscious role in the process of association, once they were heard and registered in consciousness. The subjects who had to pull the above numbers apart, called it just as quickly answer (1), if the subjects who had to add the numbers together (giving the answer of 7). It seemed that the instructions determined the associative patterns of the subjects before the experiment had even started. Ach wrote that the instructions that were of different defining tendencies, or "mental sets," caused the subjects to be unaware of them later. These did make sure, however, that the participants did start thinking in a certain direction before the experiment began.

In a way, these results corresponded well with Wundt's voluntarist psychology, the determining of the trend and the set were precisely the kind of central, steering and motivating variables that he had proposed in the process of conscious observation. But Külpe, who was suspicious of many mental chronometry experiments even before he left Leipzig, saw the results of Würzburg as an impairment of the logic of the subtractive procedure of Wundt. Külpe argued that the subjects, in the more complicated situations, did not just the perform the sum of simple reactions (perception plus apperception plus discrimination plus association, etc.). Instead, the acted in to "series", which were completely different from those of subjects in simpler situations. Külpe thus found that the logic of the subtractive procedure apparently simplified the true process of thinking and reacting. Although Wundt protested, Kulpe's argument was generally more convincing.

Who was Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)?

Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who did a lot of research into memory. To the late seventies, he read Fechners' 'Elements of Psychophysics'. After that, he wanted to try to apply the same kind of experimental treatment to the new memory topic as Fechner had on sensation apply. Wundt just had his 'Physiological Psychology' published, in which he stated that higher processes such as memory could not be experimentally investigated. 

Ebbinghaus saw this as a challenge. He developed nonsense syllables by systematically continuing the alphabet and formed more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant combinations, such as taz, bok and lef. These words could serve as original neutral or meaningless stimuli, which had to be remembered in his experiments to become. Ebbinghaus made a list of these words and tried to learn and remember them under controlled learn conditions. After he knew his list by heart, he tested himself on the preservation of these words in his memory under different circumstances. Learning the entire list all over again took him a shorter period of time than the first time he did the words learned. Ebbinghaus used fractional 'savings' in study time as a quantitative measurement of the strength of his memory. When Ebbinghaus calculated his average savings for various periods between the first and the second time he learned the words, he was not surprised to find that the savings were smaller when the interval was larger. More surprisingly, however, the rate of decline was not constant, but on a regular basis forgetting curve in which his memory declined rapidly after the first learning, but afterwards remained almost stable. The shape of this forgetting curve was similar to psychophysical law from Fechner. He demonstrated that the memory can be experimentally investigated.

Wundt remained intellectually involved until his 85th, when he retired. He also remained writing about Völker psychology and completed his autobiography 8 days before his death in 1920. In general, however, historians were not at all pleased with Wundt. Recently, however, his work has been again reviewed by many historians, and he is better understood. The current interest in the central cognitive processes in psychology indicate a renewed interest in Wundt.

ExamTips

• In current exams, Wundt’s eventual beliefs (Chapter 5) are referred to as Wundt 1 and Wundt 2. Wundt 1 being the experimental inductive science and Wundt 2 being the research into the possibilities of the higher mental states.
• Gestalt psychology is still a huge movement. If you google 'gestalt psychology pictures', you can find some images to make you better understand what this chapter is trying to describe