The psychological Laboratory at Leipsic

1 Pages 343 Words

“The psychological Laboratory at Leipsic”
The article, “The psychological Laboratory at Leipsic”, by James McKeen Cattell, describes the laboratory and the processes of experimentation. Psychology is different from other sciences, and philosophy, in that it uses experimentation to try and figure out why things work the way they do. An important task in a psychology students’ curriculum is that they learn the process of experimentation and why that experiment proves or disproves their hypothesis. Psychology tries to explain the connection between the body and the mind, and controlled, well-organized experiments give a good clue to what goes on.
Professor Wundt, who decided to have his male students divide up into experimentor and subject groups, to have experiements done by each other, first thought up the psychology laboratory. Wundt would aid the student’s questions but lead them to find their own conclusions. Wundt also established a journal for publication of the research called “MIND”.
The work at Leipsic is grouped into four sections, the analysis and measurement of sensation, the duration of mental processes, the time-sense, and attention, memory and the association of ideas. The first deals with the relationship between our senses and physical stimuli. For example, Wundt, and Fechner’s laws of constant stimuli, where for a given situation there will always be a constant number used to figure out the outcome.
The duration of mental processes is related to the time reaction of reflexes and the time of sensory perception. The time-sense is how quickly or slowly our senses react to a stimulus. Finally attention, memory and the association of ideas are dealing with the mind, and how it creates and stores knowledge.
This article tells the background of experiments and why they are still important in psychology today. Wundt not only started the first experimental laboratory but also created the first researc...