Wundt

• Wundt set up the first laboratory of experimental psychology in 1875
• The timeline of psychology includes Wundt in 1879, Freud in the 1890s, behaviorists Pavlov (1890s), Watson (1913), and Skinner (1940), Bandura in the 1960s with SLT, the humanist school of psychology, cognitive psychology from the 1960s, biological psychology in the 1990s, and cognitive neuroscience as the most modern form of psychology
• Structuralismis an approach to psychology that involves breaking down thoughts about an object into separate elements to uncover the structure of the mind
• Wundt showed that introspection could be used to study mental states in replicable laboratory experiments
• Introspection

  • A systematic analysis of one’s own conscious experiences of a standard stimulus, then reporting the experience
  • Inward experiences were analyzed in terms of components such as sensations, emotional reactions, and mental images
  • Thoughts were broken down into separate elements for reporting
• Wundt's work was criticized by later behaviorist learning theorists who focused only on observable inputs and outputs, not internal mental processes studied by introspection
• Wundt used the scientific method to study the structure of sensation and perception
• Wundt wrote the first textbook of psychology (Principles of Physiological Psychology, 1873-4)
• Research process by Wundt

  1. Same stimulus with the same surroundings and instructions given to each participant

  2. Participants were highly trained

  3. Breaking thoughts about an object down into separate elements to uncover the structure of the mind
• German doctor and psychologist William Wundt opened the world's first experimental laboratory at the University of Leipzig


  1879
• Wundt paved the way for later scientifically controlled research into psychology
• The study of mental processes was later continued by cognitive psychologists who built models of how systems such as memory worked, using experimentation instead of introspection
• Wundt was unable to replicate his findings. Because of this, Wundt’s research can be said to be unreliable and unscientific.