Hi there, I am facing some problem on doing my project.Can u pls me some guideline?thanks

-- Shuhui (ziconz@yahoo.com), June 09, 2004

Answers

You might want to have a look at the first chapter or two of Wundt's first textbook, _Principles of Physiological Psychology_. You can find (Titchener's translation of) it on-line at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Wundt/Physio/

For more information on Wundt, have a look at Bringmann & Tweney's (Eds.) book, _Wundt Studies_. The book is a little old now, but it marks a major turning point in our understanding of Wundt and his contribution to psychology (one that goes unnoticed by many traditional history of psych textbooks that follow E.G. Boring's too-Titchenerian account of Wundt).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), June 09, 2004.

Hi Shuhui, I am not a cognitive psychologist, but I will try to answer your question. I think Wundt was an early psychological researcher, that was specifically interested in developing an experimental and academic discipline of psychology. He is sometimes referred to as the father of (experimental) psychology, though in addition to his famous experiments on basic cognitive (and emotional) structures and processes, he speculated extensively in writing on more complex issues like social psychology. He was interested in using experiments to discover the basic elements of consciousness, because he saw them as the building blocks of the mind, and thought that they were simple enough to experiment on. Like many people of his time (e.g., William James), he was particularly interested in understanding conscious experience, seeing it as being at the heart of the human experience and the key to understanding the mind (hence defining psychology as the scientific study of mind). He tried to discover the basic elements of consciousness by carefully designing and controlling experiments, and training experimenter/subjects to avoid attending to on higher-level processing. While he did increase our understanding of cognitive structures and processes, he ran into difficulties. One problem was that the basic building blocks of conscious that he was trying to discover, were often not readily available to consciousness or were mixed with somewhat automatic high- level processing (particularly associations). For example, it is hard to attend to redness independent of other sensations or the many somewhat automatic associations to red. Also we are often not aware of important early cognitive processes in a sequence, as when we read we only have limited awareness of the various processes leading up to our understanding a sentence. Experimental results also varied among subjects and labs. While the beginning of cognitive psychology is sometimes dated to the mid 20th century, I see Wundt as an early cognitive psychologist. 20th century (Modern) cognitive psychology was hardened (made more objective),in part by the behavioral movement that directly preceded it, and also developed more sophisticated models based particularly on computers, communication models, and more recently biological models. In general there was also somewhat of a shift away from studying consciousness, to more testable and practical topics. I hope this helps. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (pkleinginna@georgiasouthern.edu), June 09, 2004.

Hello Shuhui

The following link (and ones connected to it) discuss the context, discipline building activities and partial uptake of Wundt's work.

http://www.comnet.ca/~pballan/section3(210).htm

Cheers,

Paul F. Ballantyne

-- Paul F. Ballantyne (pballan@comnet.ca), June 10, 2004.