October 8, 2024

·      What question about the reading for today did I prepare before class?

o   What is your reaction to Wundt’s desire to place psychology as a branch of philosophy?

o   Do you think lab equipment will ever do full justice for the complexity of human experiences? Or do you think, as Wundt did, that higher mental processes (language) as well as products of culture such as religion require comparative, qualitative and historical methods?

·      What key ideas did I hear in seminar today?

o   Wundt's early research focused in physiology and astronomy but carried implications for future psychological research

o   In 1874 Wundt fulfilled the promise that was made in his 1867 paper and completed the two volumes of Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie.

o   He also played a major role as designer, supervisor, and sometimes the subject in many of the experiments that occured in his lab.

o   Wundt firmly believed that there was a type of non-experimental psychology that explored the communal and cultural products of human nature: religions, mythologies, customs, and above all languages and their derivative higher processes.

o   Wundt firmly believed experimentation could never be the only method for psychology as a whole.

o   Cattell invented a instrument that allowed him to present various kinds of stimuli and record the reaction-time for his studies.

o   Perception - One simply responds to a stimulus automatically, mechanically, and thoughtlessly.

o   Apperception - One’s full attention is focused on the stimulus and it is consciously recognized interpreted, and thought about.

o   Wundt continued writing his Völkerpsychologie, he completed the 60,000+ pages just eight days before his death.

·      What substantive ideas or comments did I contribute in seminar today?

o   I presented

o   Discuss the usefulness and limitations of introspection as a psychological research method.

o   In a typical Wundtian experiment, what we would now call the experimenter and subject roles were interchangeable, and investigators were typically interested in studying their own responses to the experimental situation.

·      What did I learn today that contributed to my understanding of psychology?

o   Wundt is a very important figure in the history of modern psychology and if we had not had Wundt we would have been a lot further behind in Psychology than we currently are today.