Early Experimental Psychology Research Articles

Unconscious inferences in perception in early experimental psychology: From Wundt to Peirce.

What are unconscious inferences in psychology? This article investigates their journey from the early philosophical psychology of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) to the experimental psychology of the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce's reception of Wundt's early works situates him in an international web of 19th-century experimental psychologists and its reconstruction opens new perspectives on the relation between philosophy, psychology, and epistemology. Moreover, this reception testifies to a heretofore overlooked strand of influence of Wundt on North American experimental psychology. The notion of unconscious inferences, of which Hermann von Helmholtz is usually considered the chief exponent, becomes the backbone of Peirce's theory of perception mostly because of the affinity between Wundt's early philosophy of mind and Peirce's logic-mediated approach to psychology.

Early Experimental Psychology: How did Replication Work Before P-Hacking?

Keywords Experimentation, Psychophysics, Repetition, Scientific Practice, Nineteenth Century, Controversy

‘Strains and relaxations’ in the perception of time: Views from early experimental Psychology and later

The article discusses some early views on whether the duration of a stimulus or event could be a directly-perceived sensation, or whether, in contrast, time judgements were necessarily indirect, mediated by various sorts of ‘strains and relaxations’ based on bodily processes. Three arguments advanced against direct perception were: (a) that duration is always judged relative to something else, so cannot be directly perceived; (b) that sensations are necessarily momentary so cannot themselves have any duration; and (c) that duration judgements were in fact based on bodily sensations or movements, particularly those involving respiration. All three arguments are discussed, with evidence relating to the involvement of bodily sensations obtained from some early studies reviewed. A final section discusses some modern research relevant to this question.

Suicide Risk: Phenomenological Notion of the Threshold Effect

Sometimes suicide is committed suddenly and other times suicide is planned long time ago. This study aims to know about the background of the time effect for psychic life how the idea of suicide is growing up. Is suicide unpredictable or is there another factor like latency coming up for being acted out? Incarceration and prison environment has a very high risk for suicide in France. This study confronted observations of psychiatrists and psychologists having prisoners as patients. Their observations are compared too with psychiatrists and psychologists having a double professional experience in town and in prison. Interpretations of statistics about suicide risk complete information. This interpretation is helped by the phenomenological notion of the threshold effect (Zutt, Kuhlenkampf) coming from early experimental psychology (Th. Fechner). All results agree about the importance of being in contact with the prisoner from the very beginning of his incarceration. The incarcerated person has to get started when entering in prison by verbalizing about himself. Later he may have lost all motivation and may be tired by all interpersonal effort. The risk of hetero and auto-aggression will be high.

Prestige technology in the evolution and social organization of early psychological science

Instruments have become a central feature of psychological science. Their introduction into a research paradigm is typically framed in terms of their practical utility in offering calibration and precision in the presentation, representation, and recording of phenomena. However, a review of early experimental psychology reveals that instruments have an additional role in terms of the accumulation of domain-specific status, or prestige. The emergence and use of prestige technologies reflects a general feature of social organization wherein group members must compete for the attention of a community. An examination of the introduction of the chronoscope demonstrates that while there was an awareness of its functional limitations, these limits were often not prominent features of later paradigmatic discourse. In contrast to early adopters, later researchers appear to have demonstrated a reduced concern for these limitations suggesting that these instruments were being used as much for their prestige function as their practical utility.

An untrained eye: the tachistoscope and photographic vision in early experimental psychology

In 1906, the psychologist Walter Dearborn published a set of photographs that mark an important moment in the history of scientific epistemologies of vision. 1 Taken as part of Dearborn’s dissertat...

The role of tone sensation and musical stimuli in early experimental psychology

In this article, the role of music in early experimental psychology is examined. Initially, the research of Wilhelm Wundt is considered, as tone sensation and musical elements appear as dominant factors in much of his work. It is hypothesized that this approach was motivated by an understanding of psychology that dates back to Christian Wolff 's focus on sensation in his empirical psychology of 1732. Wolff, however, had built his systematization of psychology on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who combined perception with mathematics,and referred to music as the area in which sensation is united with numerical exactitude. Immanuel Kant refused to accept empirical psychology as a science, whereas Johann Friedrich Herbart reintroduced the scientific basis of empirical psychology by, among other things, referring to music.

Scientific Objectivity and E. B. Titchener's Experimental Psychology

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's recent book on the history of scientific objectivity showed that, over the course of the nineteenth century, natural scientists of many stripes became intensely concerned with the issue of the distorting influence that their own subjectivities might be having on their observations and representations of nature. At very nearly the same time, experimental psychology arose specifically to investigate scientifically the nature and structure of subjective consciousness. Although Daston and Galison briefly discussed some basic psychological issues-especially the discovery of differences in human color perception-they did not strongly connect the widespread European concern with scientific objectivity to the rise of experimental psychology. This essay critically examines the theoretical and empirical activities of the experimental psychologist who most energetically strove to discover the structure of subjective conscious experience, Edward Bradford Titchener. Titchener's efforts to produce an objective study of subjectivity reveal important tensions in early experimental psychology and also serve to situate experimental psychology at the center of an important intellectual struggle that was being waged across the natural sciences in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

How to Understand Communicative Musicality?

Music is to a large extent understood as if it is a language. This is also true when it comes to the recently published book Communicative Musicality edited by Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (2009a). In this essay it is demonstrated that a lingocentric understanding of music is strongly connected to modernity, but also that early experimental psychology presupposed a distinction between music and language. Polyphony, therefore, is here presented as a characteristic for the musical system.

L’Amérique de Pierre Janet : William James & Co

This paper is a commentary on two letters from Pierre Janet to William James found at the Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine and at the Houghton Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Harvard College. One of these letters was unrecorded and turned up recently. It discusses Pierre Janet's influence on the so-called “Boston School of Psychotherapy” and his critical attitude toward “Parapsychical Research,” a field of investigation in which William James was involved in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper's aim is to show the relationship between these two leading figures of early experimental psychology. It concludes the topic from another point of view: A letter to William James from Théodore Flournoy, a psychologist from the University of Geneva, describing Janet's attitude toward parapsychological studies during the 1900 International Congress of Psychology in Paris.

Bringing history to life: Simulating landmark experiments in psychology.

The course in history of psychology can be challenging for students, many of whom enter it with little background in history and faced with unfamiliar names and concepts. The sheer volume of material can encourage passive memorization unless efforts are made to increase student involvement. As part of a trend toward experiential history, historians of science have begun to supplement their lectures with demonstrations of classic physics experiments as a way to bring the history of science to life. Here, the authors report on computer simulations of five landmark experiments from early experimental psychology in the areas of reaction time, span of attention, and apparent motion. The simulations are designed not only to permit hands-on replication of historically important results but also to reproduce the experimental procedures closely enough that students can gain a feel for the nature of early research and the psychological processes being studied.

Psychopharmacology's debt to experimental psychology.

The role of experimental psychology in the development of psychopharmacology has largely been ignored in recent historical accounts. In this article the authors attempt to redress that gap by outlining work in early experimental psychology that contributed significantly to the field. While psychiatrists focused on the therapeutic nature of drugs or their mimicry of psychopathology, experimental psychologists used psychoactive drugs as tools to study individual differences in normal behavior as well as to develop methodologies using behavior to study mechanisms of drug action. Experimental work by Kraepelin, Rivers, and Hollingworth was particularly important in establishing drug-screening protocols still used today. Research on nitrous oxide and on the effects of drug combinations is discussed to illustrate the importance of experimental psychology to psychopharmacology.

Early experimental psychology in New Zealand: the Hunter-Titchener letters.

Early experimental psychology in New Zealand: the Hunter-Titchener letters.

Educational implications of the psychology of today

In order to understand the present point of view in psychology and its relation to the many phases of education it will be necessary to review rather briefly the historical background. It is true that the present can be fully understood only in terms of the past and this is certainly true of the present-day trend in psychology. Psychology, as did all of the sciences, developed from philosophy. Certain indications of separation became apparent in the first part of the nineteenth century and in 1860 with the publication of Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics experimental quantitative psychology was set off on the course which it has followed to the present day. We should not overlook the preparation for modern psychology to be found in the works of such men as Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, the Mills, Bain, Herbart, and Lotz. They all played a part in the development of philosophical psychology which prepared the way for experimental psychology and some of the fruits of their labors may be found in our psychology of today. It remained for another German, however, Wilhelm Wundt, to put into common use the principles enumerated by Fechner concerning the study of psychological problems. Since both Fechner and Wundt were trained in medicine and physiology, it is not unusual that the early experimental psychology was largely physiological in nature. These early laboratories set out to study mental activities by a reduction of these activities into their elements. Since techniques for studying the sense organs had already been made available in physiology, it was rather natural for these physiological psychologists to borrow these techniques and through their use, along with Fechner's principles, our knowledge of sensory phenomena and their relation to mental life developed. These results continue to play a large part in present-day psychology. Further development of psychology was destined to produce systems and schools of psychology. A system represents an attempt to arrange and coordinate the facts and principles of psychology in a simple, understandable way. If this point of view is acceptable to several psychologists, who take a part in spreading its influence, then we have a school of psychology.