History

• Dualism


  The idea that mind and body are 2 separate entities
• Dualism


  • Mind is governed by free will
  • Body is governed by physical law
• Rene Descartes


  Helped to weaken the belief that the body and mind do not interact
• Rene Descartes' view


  • Mind and body have mutual interaction
• Mind could be modelled in mechanistic models same as explaining physical systems such as astronomy and physics
• Mind


  Associated with thought and perception of the external world
• The problem is how to develop a method to study thought and perception
• Ernst Weber


  • Presented an extensive experimental exploration of the sensory phenomenology of tactile experience
  • Coined the phrase 'just noticeable difference' (JND)
  • Provided an existence proof for the possibility of establishing quantitative relationships between variations in physical and mental events
• Weber's Law

  Just-noticeable difference (jnd) increases with the increases in the magnitude of the standard stimulus
• Detectable and undetectable weight differences

  • 300g, 310g, 320g (detectable)
  • 300g, 303g, 308g (undetectable)
  • 600g, 620g, 640g (detectable)
  • 600g, 610g, 615g (undetectable)
• Gustav Fechner


  • Pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysics
  • Studied the relationship between stimulus intensity and subjective experience (detection) of the stimulus
  • Popularized the Weber Law
• Fechner tried to find an absolute threshold or benchmark or baseline of all the senses
• Hermann von Helmholtz


  • Pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysiology
  • Used physiological procedures on animals to measure the reaction time of nerves to produce muscle twitches, then estimated the speed of nervous transmission in humans
  • Anticipated much of later top-down cognitive psychology
• Wilhelm Wundt


  • Generally acknowledged as a founder of experimental psychology and cognitive psychology
  • Wrote Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874)
  • Set up the first two psychological laboratories in the world
  • Introduced Introspection
• Introspection


  A process that allows us to know our inner functioning through what we can gather about the functioning of the external world
• Hermann Ebbinghaus


  • Systematic and careful approach to the study of memory
  • Demonstrated that higher cognitive processes could also be studied scientifically
  • Developed methodology to bring the study of memory out of philosophy and into the realm of empirical science
• Meaningless stimuli are more difficult to memorize than meaningful stimuli
• Relearning is easier than initial learning, and that it takes longer to forget material after each subsequent re-learning
• Learning is more effective when it is spaced out over time rather than crammed into a single marathon study session
• Forgetting happens most rapidly right after learning occurs and slows down over time