Question

1. What significant research in psychophysics was done during the 19th century that resulted in a major contribution to the "new psychology" becoming a legitimate science?

a. Be sure to name the two contributors and discuss their findings. Describe three ways that their work contributed to the new science of psychology.

b. What early psychologist was most influenced by the psychophysical work?

2. Explain briefly, why psychology has a "long history but only a short past". What well known psychologist recognized this aspect of the discipline?

3. Provide evidence for John Locke being referred to as a child psychologist based on the "advice" letters written. Explain how his views supported the empiricist approach and provide two reasons for how they specifically supported the new science of psychology.

4. What American influenced the work of early physiologists work on frog's legs? Why?

Answer 1

• 1.Ernest Weber was a German scientist who did experimentation in psychophysics.The notion that a physical change does not always make a psychological different was investigated experimentally by Ernest Weber.
  
• The resulting data from measuring the physical world of sensation and individuals' psychological experience of it based on Weber's mathematical equation was found to be a nonlinear ration illustrating the "minds bend".
• Weber experimentally determined the accuracy of tactile sensations, namely, the distance between two points on the skin, in which a person can perceive two separate touches. He discovered the two-point threshold – the distance on the skin separating two pointed stimulators that is required to experience two rather than one point of stimulation.
• German physicist Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) who founded psychophysics, a new field that undertook the empirical measurement and correlation of brain states with sensory experience.
• In this work he postulated that mind and body, though appearing to be separate entities, are actually different sides of one reality. He also developed experimental procedures, still useful in experimental psychology, for measuring sensations in relation to the physical magnitude of stimuli.
• Most important, he devised an equation to express the theory of the just-noticeable difference, advanced earlier by Ernst Heinrich Weber. This theory concerns the sensory ability to discriminate when two stimuli (e.g., two weights) are just noticeably different from each other.
• 2.Ebbinghaus meant that the subject matter of psychology has been around since the beginning, but that psychology as we know it today scientific psychology, that is a fairly new development.
• Psychology started with the philosophers aristotle, descartes, and few more philosophers who discussed the mind and peoples actions. from there Wundt commenced the study of behaviour in a laboratory in Lepzig, from there psychology began developing and manifested into what we now know.
• Probably since the beginning of humankind, people have wondered why people think, feel and do what they do (a long past) but the first documented use of the word 'psychology' was in 1530 by Marko Marulić. But it was not until 1879 when the first laboratory was founded to study psychology Wilhelm Wundt and after that, an expansion in schools of thought competing to explain ideas. So it does have a relatively short scientific history.
• 3.John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding restated the importance of the experience of the senses over speculation and sets out the case that the human mind at birth is a complete, but receptive, blank slate upon which experience imprints knowledge.
• Locke argued that people acquire knowledge from the information about the objects in the world that our senses bring. People begin with simple ideas and then combine them into more complex ones.
• In his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1697), Locke recommended practical learning to prepare people to manage their social, economic, and political affairs efficiently. He believed that a sound education began in early childhood and insisted that the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic be gradual and cumulative.
• He offered an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas through our experience of the world. The mind is then able to examine, compare, and combine these ideas in numerous different ways. Knowledge consists of a special kind of relationship between different ideas.
• Locke’s emphasis on the philosophical examination of the human mind as a preliminary to the philosophical investigation of the world and its contents represented a new approach to philosophy, one which quickly gained a number of converts, especially in Great Britain.
• This is the perspective of empiricism, a major school of thought within epistemology. It may help to remember what the term empirical means based on how it starts with the same letter as experimental, an approach that values experiencing and testing.So in his view, actually experiencing the world through our senses is the only way to arrive at a conclusion and to know the truth about something. A person testing a key in a lock would be a legitimate way to come to the conclusion, 'My key opens the door.'
• 4.In 1780, Galvani, an Italian physician and anatomist, was experimenting with dissected frogs’ legs and their attached spinal cords, mounted on iron or brass hooks. In most of his experiments, the frog leg could be made to twitch when touched with a probe made of another metal. The frog legs would also jump when hanging on a metal fence in a lightning storm.
• These observations convinced Galvani that he had found a new form of electricity, which was being generated by the frogs’ muscles. He called the phenomenon “animal electricity.”