Wilhelm Wundt was one of the great, founding fathers of modern psychology. His definition of the three main goals of psychology and understanding of the specific elements of thought were some of his major contributions. Further, Wundt helped define the terms perception, apperception and creative synthesis. His early work on the psychology of elements and his later work in the Volkerpsychologie helped to cement his position as an outstanding and influential psychologist. Wundtian psychology has declined greatly in recent times, largely as a result of his reliance on introspection. Wundt's three main goal of psychology were to describe, predict and explain behavior. Wundt was one of the first psychologists to set psychology apart from philosophy. …show more content…
He founded the psychological school of structuralism that believed that the mind could be studied, like any other physical entity. Structuralism broke down thought into three main elements: sensations, feelings and images. These three elements each with specific attributes, combined to form conscious experience. Wundt also played a great role in defining the terms perception, apperception and creative synthesis. Wundt initially saw perception as simply the work of sensory organs, like the eyes and ears. Eventually, however, he began to feel that perception was the work of a central, mental, and introspective process of central synthesis. He argued that the sensory organs interacted with mental representations like thoughts and memories to form a person's perception of an event. He saw apperception as basic mental activity, where mind was seen as an activity, not a substance. In this sense then, apperception was part of Wundt's understanding that psychology as part of an elaborate …show more content…
Wundt felt that attention played a large role in higher human cognitive phenomena. He felt that the center of attention, or consciousness, helped to group together perceived ideas. Attention, then helped to form the basis of memory and a person's conscious interpretation of events. Wundt felt that attention was crucial in the formation of memories, and the process of creative synthesis, where apperceived were grouped together in a central way, thus forming the conscious representation of events and memories. Wundt's early work on the psychology of elements and his later work in the Volkerpsychologie were related, with respect to both method and subject matter. Volkerpsychologie expounded the idea that higher cognitive phenomena (like human language) could best be understood in terms of experimental and ethnographic methodology. He expanded on this in his work, Volkerpsychologie, a ten volume work that was published in 1920, relatively late in his