PS101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: The Roots, Times Square Ball, Wilhelm Wundt
Document Summary
Psychology is the study of behaviour and the mental processes such as thought and. When studying why a certain behaviour or mental process occurs, one can study the influences of: Starts when people wondered about human nature and human behaviour. Philosophers were the ones arguing about what it was to be human, alive, and to experience things. Wundt conducted the first documented psychology study. Wundt dropped a ball and asked participants press a key when they hear a ball drop. Goal: understand how the simplest elements of structure of conscious experience combine to create more complex perceptions and behaviours. So what did they do in their experiments. Perception of visual stimuli, touch and hearing. Two schools of thought: structuralism 101 (titchener - student of wundt continues the tradition) Belief that all experience could be reduced to basic elements. Could identify the structures (eg, chemistry water = h2o)
