Gary Wundt On The History Of Experimental Psychology

Gary continues stating his opinion that the new science took hold and developed in the late 19th and 20th century was a transformation of the old science he also gave certain historical facts to support this. He states that the theories of special perception of Wundt took its theoretical bearing from the earlier work done by Johann Steinbuch, Caspar Tourtual etc which in turn were framed by the work of Des carte. The author states “although the theoretical framework was defined, the later generation, the basic descriptions of all these theories pointed out to the previous work”.

Providing all these facts and evidence finally the author concludes this section saying that all the above mentioned are true. The way the conventional story of psychology,

Therefore, he states how it stimulated the experimental psychologists to take action and to consolidate the image of psychology as at the core experimental level and distancing themselves from the philosophy. Gary Hatfield states the work of E.G. Boring “History of Experimental Psychology” (1929): where Boring states “connections with philosophy were relegated from a prehistorical phase from which psychology properly had emerged by freeing itself from philosophy as though psychology was merely existent from 1879 instead of merely being

He says how Gestalt psychology, Kohler and Kafka were open opponents of behaviourism who also studied thought and perception of using phenomenological methods. They also put forward the work of Wundt who published a popular handbook in experimental psychology which consisted of many chapters on cognitive topics. The author quotes “it is true that the advent of computer and information- processing models in 1950’s provided new modules and analogies in framing more theories of the cognitive task. He also says how early computer analogies in psychology did not yield computational theories of the sort and characteristics of cognitive science during 1980’s. The author adds though the theory adopted a flow chart model for tracking information through various processes and compared the psychologist’s task of discovering the program of human cognition. It did express skepticism about accepting such program or models of the actual psychological process. The author’s impression is that the majority of American psychologists studying cognition did not join the cognitive science movement fully which in turn suppressed the development of cognitive psychology during those