Explain Why Did Wundt Believe That Experimentation In Psychology Was Of Uselessness

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1. Why did Wundt believe that experimentation in psychology was of limited uselessness? The distinction is what kind of science can be conducted on what kind of subject. Wundt placed a larger segment of psychology in Geisteswissenschaften than in the Naturwissenschaften (natural), because he realized the limitations of experimentation. Therefore, yes, Wundt believed that experimentation in psychology was of limited usefulness since he argued that in this broad perspective a variety of methods such as developmental, comparative, introspective, dedicative, statistical and experimental could and should be brought to bear on the analysis of psychological phenomena. In addition, he made it clear that experimental methods, though of great potential …show more content…

Titchener felt that the goals for psychology were the determination of the what, how, and why of mental life. Titchener said that “the what” was to be learned through careful introspection and analysis. The ultimate goal was to catalog the basic mental elements that account for all conscious experience. Titchener then went on to explain that “the how” was to be an answer to the question of how the elements combine. Titchener stated that ‘the why” was to involve a search for the neurological correlates of mental events. Titchener sought only to describe mental experience and the structure of the mind. Titchener believed in the concept of consciousness instead of introspection, whereas Wundt believed in introspection as the ways to study the psychological phenomena. In addition, Wundt did not believe in the soul and the body while conducting his research. Whereas, Titchener firmly believed that the soul and body was the key to understanding psychology. Titchener also disagreed with Wundt views, especially his views founded on the cultural, linguistic, and social …show more content…

Ebbinghaus’s work focused on learning and memory in which he systematically and experimentally described, at the moment they occurred, not after. After learning nonsense syllables to perfection, Ebbinghaus then relearned the group of syllables. He recorded the number of exposures it took to relearn the material and subtracted that from the number of exposures it took to initially learn the material. The difference between the two is a savings and by plotting savings as a function of time, Ebbinghaus created psychology's first retention curve. Ebbinghaus found that forgetting was most rapid during the first few hours following a learning event and relatively slow thereafter. He also found that if he overlearned the original material, meaning continual exposure to the material after mastery, the rate of forgetting was considerably reduced. Ebbinghaus found that distributed practice was more efficient than massed practice. In addition, Ebbinghaus, was the first to publish on children’s intelligence and he deemed that slow learning was best instead of cramming in a lot of information all at once. He also discovered that over learning was an important aspect of learning and was a very good concept to practice since it meant a much higher retention of knowledge retained from one’s

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