Lecture 1: From phrenology to
scientific theory
Early psychologists
Wilhelm Wundt (1832 – 1920)
- Suggested career at school: postman
- Three Nobel prize nominations
- First psychological laboratory: 1879 in Leipzig
- First psychological journal: Philosphische Studien
- Challenged 2500-year old theory of association
Lightner Witmer (1867 – 1956)
- Student of Wundt
- Founder of clinical psychology
- First psychological clinic
- First journal: The Psychological Clinic
Mary calkins
- Student William James
- Technique of paired associates (memory research)
- First female president of APA
Helen Thompson
- First studies of differences in men and women (in psychological sense)
- Used experimental methods in these studies
William James
- Started out as painter
- Bestseller: Principles of psychology
- Integrated psychological knowledge
Robert Woodworth
- Bestseller: experimental Psychology
1
, Pre-scientific approaches
1) Associationism = mental processes proceed by way of associations
o Aristotle: tubala rasa (= being born with no content in mind, filled by
perception). The senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste provide
modality-specific sensory images that come together in a supra-modal mental
faculty, called the common sense. Aristotle distinguished between modality-
specific sensory images and supra-modal mental faculties, which work on the
images and associations.
o Locke (Enlightenment) assumptions:
1) blank state: we are born without built-in mental content
2) sensoristic: our senses provide the elementary mental images
3) atomistic: the elementary sensory images are the building blocks
(atoms) for the construction of more complex mental contents
4) associative: this construction is done by association
- empiricism = mind is a blank state at birth and all knowledge is obtained via senses
- nativism = people have innate mental abilities and knowledge
2) Law of Contiguity = basic law of associationism (Aristotle)
‘If two things repeatedly occur simultaneously, the presence of one of them will
remind us of the other’
3) Long-term potentiation = Neuronal basis of the law of contiguity; prolonged rise in
the efficiency of a synapse resulting from a change in the neuronal structure.
Discovered in 1973 in the hippocampus of rabbits
Hebb’s law (1949): if 2 nerve cells are simultaneously stimulated for a period of
time, synapse changes occur
4) Connectionism = Modern form of associationism
New addition: computer simulations
o Connectionism formalizes associative networks and processes through
mathematical equations in computer programs
5) Horizontal faculties = domain-general functions (Locke & Aristotle)
o Learning, memory, attention, perception and will work in the same way in
different content domains
2
scientific theory
Early psychologists
Wilhelm Wundt (1832 – 1920)
- Suggested career at school: postman
- Three Nobel prize nominations
- First psychological laboratory: 1879 in Leipzig
- First psychological journal: Philosphische Studien
- Challenged 2500-year old theory of association
Lightner Witmer (1867 – 1956)
- Student of Wundt
- Founder of clinical psychology
- First psychological clinic
- First journal: The Psychological Clinic
Mary calkins
- Student William James
- Technique of paired associates (memory research)
- First female president of APA
Helen Thompson
- First studies of differences in men and women (in psychological sense)
- Used experimental methods in these studies
William James
- Started out as painter
- Bestseller: Principles of psychology
- Integrated psychological knowledge
Robert Woodworth
- Bestseller: experimental Psychology
1
, Pre-scientific approaches
1) Associationism = mental processes proceed by way of associations
o Aristotle: tubala rasa (= being born with no content in mind, filled by
perception). The senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste provide
modality-specific sensory images that come together in a supra-modal mental
faculty, called the common sense. Aristotle distinguished between modality-
specific sensory images and supra-modal mental faculties, which work on the
images and associations.
o Locke (Enlightenment) assumptions:
1) blank state: we are born without built-in mental content
2) sensoristic: our senses provide the elementary mental images
3) atomistic: the elementary sensory images are the building blocks
(atoms) for the construction of more complex mental contents
4) associative: this construction is done by association
- empiricism = mind is a blank state at birth and all knowledge is obtained via senses
- nativism = people have innate mental abilities and knowledge
2) Law of Contiguity = basic law of associationism (Aristotle)
‘If two things repeatedly occur simultaneously, the presence of one of them will
remind us of the other’
3) Long-term potentiation = Neuronal basis of the law of contiguity; prolonged rise in
the efficiency of a synapse resulting from a change in the neuronal structure.
Discovered in 1973 in the hippocampus of rabbits
Hebb’s law (1949): if 2 nerve cells are simultaneously stimulated for a period of
time, synapse changes occur
4) Connectionism = Modern form of associationism
New addition: computer simulations
o Connectionism formalizes associative networks and processes through
mathematical equations in computer programs
5) Horizontal faculties = domain-general functions (Locke & Aristotle)
o Learning, memory, attention, perception and will work in the same way in
different content domains
2
