Scientific Psychology

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how, throughout the history of scientific psychology, theory and practical application have interacted to support and direct the evolution of the field. It looks at the development of the field from the work of Wilhelm Wundt with sensory perception and the nature of human consciousness to the work of Ebbinghaus, Muller and Kulpe who developed ideas and techniques which showed that the scientific and experimental study of higher mental processes was feasible.

From the Paper:

"Although Wundt is given credit for his work in developing a scientific basis for psychological theory, many of his contemporaries disagreed with his structuralist approach, feeling that consciousness was a relative whole that could not be broken into individual, quantifiable pieces. Gestalt psychology, for example, argued against an atomistic approach, and many of the theories associated with Gestalt ideas exist today in the field of cognitive psychology. Overall, however, Wundt did not believe that higher mental processes could be studied by experiment, but rather that they could possibly be inferred from simple results gathered in experiments."

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