PSY 421 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Mental Chronometry, Apperception, Wilhelm Wundt
Document Summary
After reading and discussing chapter 9, students should: Be familiar with the events and ideas that culminated in the voluntarism of wundt. Be aware of and acquainted with competing approaches to wundt and titchener. Be acquainted with the research of ebbinghaus and its importance. The name that wundt gave to his approach to psychology was voluntarism because of its emphasis on will, choice, and purpose. Voluntarism, then, was psychology"s first school not structuralism, as is often claimed. Psychology"s goal was to understand both simple (basic processes of the mind) and complex (higher mental processes) conscious phenomena. For simple phenomena, experimentation was to be used; however, for complex phenomena experimentation could not be used. Only various forms of naturalistic observation could be used. Mediate experience and data are obtained via measuring devices and thus not direct. Immediate experience and data are events in human consciousness as they occurred. This was to be the subject matter of psychology.
