Reception of experimental pedagogy and psychology in Chile. Analysis of the intellectual influences of Wilhelm Mann, 1904-1915

This article provides a detailed analysis of the intellectual research project of Wilhelm Mann, one of the pioneers of experimental and educational psychology in Chile. Mann's work has been the object of so little analysis that his intellectual influences and networks are not clearly known. We analyzed 338 intratext citations from 22 works by Wilhelm Mann published during the period 1904-1915. As a result, we obtained a mapping of his cooperation networks and used a quantitative approach to study the authors who most influenced his career, among whom were William Stern, Herbert Spencer, Wilhelm Wundt, Alfred Binet, and Ernst Meumann. Mann was closely connected to the international and contemporary advances and discussions of his time, despite the lack of infrastructure and difficulties in communication. Mann was the first psychologist to develop a long-term project in Chile that aimed to measure the individualities of Chilean students and their intellectual development.

Reconstruction of Wilhelm Wundt's last residence in Saxony and the search for subsequent use as a research institute, fellowship house, or museum of psychotechnics

The German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) is now recognized worldwide as the founding figure of academic psychology. He founded the first Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig in 1879 and gained recognition during his lifetime. The scientist's last home in the small village of Großbothen in East Germany, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Berlin, was left to decay after German reunification in 1989/1990. Wundt's other homes in Leipzig were destroyed during World War II. During the GDR period, when the house was owned by the public sector, an inscription in honor of Wundt was added. It then stood empty for many years and fell into disrepair. In June 2016, an association was founded at Schloss Altranstädt near Leipzig with the aim of acquiring the rights to use the Wilhelm Wundt House. Thanks to their efforts, the house has now been entrusted to a conservationist as of 2018. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention and Free Will in Experimental Psychology: An Unexpected Analysis of Voluntary Action by William James and Theodule Ribot

This article aims to highlight the difficulties encountered by the experimental psychology promoted by Ribot, at the end of the nineteenth century up until the beginning of the twentieth century, with regard to the question of free will as part of his analysis of voluntary attention. It also aims to shed some light on William James's possible role in Ribot's subtle change of opinion in regards to the power of attention, as a mental effort somehow revealing the possibility of a top-down voluntary activity. In most of Ribot's work, at first glance, the will is understood as a determined product of our idiosyncratic character, of our affective and physiological tendencies-rather than as an autonomous faculty of self-determination. But what might look like Ribot's commitment to determinism calls for some nuance. Some uses of the term "voluntary" in his work, particularly to describe the phenomenon of attention, seem to refer to a form of free will looking a lot more like an autonomous faculty than like a mere illusion induced by an epiphenomenal conscious state. We end the paper with remarks about the current state of studies of consciousness and voluntary action in relation to Ribot and James's accounts of attention and will.

Unconscious inferences in perception in early experimental psychology: From Wundt to Peirce

What are unconscious inferences in psychology? This article investigates their journey from the early philosophical psychology of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) to the experimental psychology of the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce's reception of Wundt's early works situates him in an international web of 19th-century experimental psychologists and its reconstruction opens new perspectives on the relation between philosophy, psychology, and epistemology. Moreover, this reception testifies to a heretofore overlooked strand of influence of Wundt on North American experimental psychology. The notion of unconscious inferences, of which Hermann von Helmholtz is usually considered the chief exponent, becomes the backbone of Peirce's theory of perception mostly because of the affinity between Wundt's early philosophy of mind and Peirce's logic-mediated approach to psychology.

Levels of communication: The talking horse experiments

In the early twentieth century, counting and speaking horses, like the famous Clever Hans or the "Horses of Elberfeld," became widely debated subjects in experimental psychology. The idea was to determine whether their learning success was only a fraud, or if it might open up a new chapter in "animal psychology" - or even belong to the realm of parapsychology and telepathy. When their tricks were discovered, the teachers of the animals were marked as charlatans. Both the attempts to detect charlatans and the efforts to avoid this accusation during the talking horse experiments proceeded using the method of introducing new levels of communication into the human-animal interaction process in order to substantiate each respective standpoint. This paper argues that the scientific studies and debates on the talking horses are relevant not only from psychological, biological, and semiotic vantage points, but also from the perspective of communications theory, giving rise to the foundational issue of levels of communication.

Roberto Ardigò as a forerunner of George M. Stratton's experiments on inverted vision

After Johannes Kepler's supposition of inverted and reversed retinal images and Christoph Scheiner's anatomical demonstration of such an inversion, the question arose whether this inversion is necessary and how it is possible to see an upright world based on an inverted image. The answer to this question is commonly attributed to the American psychologist George M. Stratton, who produced, in 1896, upright retinal images by means of lenses and showed that after a phase of inverted perception, upright vision is restored. However, prior to 1886, the Italian philosopher Roberto Ardigò had already performed optical experiments with a prism, obtaining a similar result. The intend of his optical investigation was essentially psychological, in opposition to contemporary physiological approaches. He accepted Hermann von Helmholtz's basic assumptions, but interpreted the results of his experiments in the framework of a more detailed theory of perception. The present article aims to analyze Ardigò's experiments and compare them with Stratton's in order to give them the place they deserve in the history of experimental psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Gold medal award for life achievement in the science of psychology: Alan E. Kazdin

Alan E. Kazdin is recognized for his extensive and influential contributions to psychological science through exemplary research, influential clinical applications, and inspiring professional leadership. His research has brought innovation and rigor to the study of intervention for children's conduct problems. His Yale Parenting Center has put those interventions into action, demonstrating their realworld relevance. His leadership in founding and editing the major journals of clinical science, and his service as president of our major professional organizations, has spread his scientific and humane values throughout our discipline. The legendary Kazdin eloquence and wit, packed into every presentation, have inspired generations of psychologists, underscoring a legacy that is profound and enduring (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Confusion about confusion: Édouard Toulouse's dementia test, 1905-20

Psychiatrist Édouard Toulouse (1865-1947) is known today for his 1896 psychometric study of the novelist Émile Zola, and his contributions to mental hygiene, sexology, eugenics, and labour efficiency in inter-war France. This paper examines research undertaken in Toulouse's Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Villejuif asylum near Paris. In 1905, Toulouse created a test that could differentiate between dementia and mental confusion, a test that could aid in the classification of patients at the overcrowded Villejuif facility. By 1920, however, the test's early promise was undercut by unforeseen, 'machinic' resistance that emerged in the experimental process. This case study demonstrates the non-linear nature of scientific practice and limits of even the most innovative asylum reforms in this period.

On making sense. An exploration of Wundt's apperceptionist account of meaningful speech

In the wake of the critical reorientation in the historiography of psychology, a number of scholars challenged the one-sided structuralist and positivist interpretation of Wilhelm Wundt's work. This paper aims at contributing to these recent efforts, by providing an analysis of the way in which Wundt's apperceptionism conditioned his account of the relation between thought and speech, and by extrapolation, of disorganized thought and speech. While Wundt's pivotal role in the development of the psychology of language is relatively well-known, discussions on this part of his theorizing tend to focus exclusively on his gestural or motor account of language. This obliterates the complex theoretical background of Wundt's theory of language and speech, as well as its systematic place within his psychological system. Highlighting this neglected dimension of Wundt's theorizing, however, could open up a new horizon of pressing research questions in the historiography of psychology.

Associationism and cognition: Human contingency learning at 25

A major topic within human learning, the field of contingency judgement, began to emerge about 25 years ago following publication of an article on depressive realism by Alloy and Abramson (1979). Subsequently, associationism has been the dominant theoretical framework for understanding contingency learning but this has been challenged in recent years by an alternative cognitive or inferential approach. This article outlines the key conceptual differences between these approaches and summarizes some of the main methods that have been employed to distinguish between them.

George Mandler (1924-2016)

Presents an obituary for George Mandler, who died in London on May 6, 2016 at the age of 91. Mandler was one of the pioneers of the cognitive revolution in psychology. He was instrumental in moving the study of human learning from notions based largely on associations to a view of memory as an organized, nested hierarchical structure. Mandler was also a major proponent of the dual-process theory of recognition memory, in which general feelings of familiarity are distinguished from the context-rich experience of recollection. He brought the study of emotion into prominence, suggesting how emotion and cognition are related. Finally, he repatriated the concept of consciousness from its intellectual exile under behaviorism, stating boldly in 1975 that the construct was respectable, useful, and probably necessary. Mandler edited the Psychological Review from 1970 to 1976, chaired the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, and was president of APA Divisions 1 (General Psychology) and 3 (Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science). (PsycINFO Database Record

Théodore Flournoy on synesthetic personification

In 1893, Théodore Flournoy published a landmark book on synesthesia - Des phénomènes de synopsie [Of Synoptic Phenomena]. The book presented a pioneering chapter on synesthetic personification, including numerous striking case examples, and it is frequently cited by twenty-first-century researchers as providing some of the earliest examples of the phenomenon. Flournoy employed a broad definition of personification - the representation of stimuli as concrete and specific individuals or inanimate objects. This definition encompassed a more extensive set of phenomena than the definition used by researchers today and was illustrated by cases that would fall outside of contemporary subtypes of synesthetic personification. Yet, Flournoy's seminal work remains unavailable in English, and the extent of the phenomenon that he described has not been discussed in the contemporary literature. We provide an unabridged translation of Flournoy's chapter "Des personnifications" ["Of Personifications"].

Franz Brentano and the beginning of experimental psychology: implications for the study of psychological phenomena today

The manifestation of psychology as an academic discipline more than a 100 years ago was accompanied by a paradigm shift in our understanding of psychological phenomena-with both its light and shadow sides. On the one hand, this development allowed for a rigorous and experimentation-based approach to psychological phenomena; on the other, it led to an alienation from the experiential-or qualia-facets as the topics under inquiry were researched increasingly through third-person (e.g., behavioral or physiological) measures. At the turning point of this development stood an eminent but little known European scholar, Franz Brentano, who called for a synthesis of both third-person and first-person research methods in the study of psychological phenomena. On the occasion of his death, a hundred years ago on March 17, 1917 we wish to illustrate the historical background, introduce the reader to Brentano's approach and work and discuss its relevance for experimental psychology today.

Designing for development: Across the scales of time

This essay traces the history of an activity designed to promote the intellectual and social development of elementary-age schoolchildren during the afterschool hours. Following in the footsteps of Urie Bronfenbrenner, I highlight his argument that just as all human development occurs in contexts of varying levels of inclusiveness and mutual interchange, human development occurs at intersecting scales of time that themselves vary in character and duration. The task of exploring Bronfenbrenner's idea confronts scholars interested in person-context coconstitutive processes with a difficult methodological requirement; they must study simultaneously the history of persons (at the microgenetic and ontogenetic time scales) as well the history of "the contexts of development" in which the persons participate. A project implementing such a study focused on the life course of the system of activity is described, followed by a discussion of the lessons to be learned from a temporally extensive study of persons developing in contexts that are themselves changing. (PsycINFO Database Record

Bibliographical Note on Behavioral Aspects: On the Margin of the 50th Anniversary of the Minnesota Starvation-Nutritional Rehabilitation Experiment

The principal technical aim of this note is to bring together bibliographic information on the papers dealing with the behavioral aspects of the study and published both before and, in particular, after the appearance in print of the two-volume treatise on The Biology of Human Starvation by Keys, et al. in 1950, which provides a systematic, comprehensive account. The communications fall into three categories: methods, results, and overviews. The section on results is concerned primarily with the effects on personality.

THE IMPORTANCE OF INSTRUMENT MAKERS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY: THE CASE OF ALFRED BINET AT THE SORBONNE LABORATORY

The importance of instrument firms in the development of psychology, and science in general, should not be underestimated since it would not have been possible for various leading psychologists at the turn of the twentieth century to conduct certain experiments without the assistance of instrument makers, as is often the case today. To illustrate the historical perspective introduced here, the example of Alfred Binet is taken, as he is an interesting case of a psychologist working in close collaboration with various French instrument designers of the time. The objective of this article is twofold: (1) to show the considerable activity carried out by early psychologists to finalize new laboratory instruments in order to develop their research projects; (2) to reassess the work of a major figure in French psychology through his activity as a designer of precision instruments. The development of these new instruments would certainly have been difficult without the presence in Paris of numerous precision instrument manufacturers such as Charles Verdin, Otto Lund, Henri Collin, and Lucien Korsten, on whom Binet successively called in order to develop his projects in the field of experimental psychology.

Between biomedical and psychological experiments: The unexpected connections between the Pasteur Institutes and the study of animal mind in the second quarter of twentieth-century France

This article explores the unexpected connections between the Pasteur Institute in French Guinea and the study of animal mind in early twentieth century France. At a time when the study of animal intelligence was thriving in France and elsewhere, apes were appealing research subjects both in psychological and biomedical studies. Drawing on two case studies (Guillaume/Meyerson and Urbain), and then, on someone responding negatively to those connections, Thétard, this article shows how the long reach of biomedicine (linked to the prestige of Bernard and Pasteur) impinged on French biology and played a role in the tortuous, if not unsuccessful fate of animal psychology in France in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It shows how attempts to use apes (and other zoo animals) to yield new insights on animal psychology faced heavy restrictions or experienced false starts, and examines the reasons why animal psychology could not properly thrive at that time in France. Beyond the supremacy of biomedical interests over psychological ones, this article additionally explains that some individuals used animal behaviour studies as steppingstones in careers in which they proceeded on to other topics. Finally, it illustrates the tension between non-academic and academic people at a time when animal psychology was trying to acquire scientific legitimacy, and also highlights the difficulties attached to the scientific study of animals in a multipurpose and hybrid environment such as the early twentieth century Parisian zoo and also the Pasteur Institute of French Guinea.

LAUNCHING A CAREER IN PSYCHOLOGY WITH ACHIEVEMENT AND ARROGANCE: JAMES McKEEN CATTELL AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, 1882-1883

The scientific career of eminent experimentalist and psychological tester James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944) began at the Johns Hopkins University during the year (1882-1883) he held the university's Fellowship in Philosophy. This article opens by sketching the scope of Cattell's lifetime achievement and then briefly reviews the historical attention that his life and career has attracted during the past few decades. It then outlines the origins and evolution of Cattell's "scientific ideology," traces the course of events that led to his fellowship, reviews his earliest studies at Johns Hopkins, and analyzes in some detail his initial laboratory successes. These laid the groundwork for his later distinguished work as a psychological experimentalist, both in Europe and America. It concludes, however, that even as Cattell's early experimental achievements impressed others, the personal arrogance he exhibited during his year in Baltimore served to alienate him from his colleagues and teachers. Over the long run, this arrogance and his often-antagonistic approach to others continued to color (and even shape) his otherwise distinguished more than 50-year scientific career.

The Hipp chronoscope versus the d'Arsonval chronometer: laboratory instruments measuring reaction times that distinguish German and French orientations of psychology

Chronoscopes and chronographs were commonly used instruments that measured reaction times (RTs) in the first psychology laboratories. The Hipp chronoscope is commonly associated with the emergence of psychological laboratories in the late 19th century. This instrument is considered the key apparatus for the study of scientific psychology. Although German and American psychologists preferred the Hipp chronoscope, French psychologists of late 19th century favored another chronometer built by Jacques Arsène d'Arsonval (1851-1940). Unlike German and American psychologists, French psychologists demanded less precision in most experimental situations because they claimed that individual differences are very pronounced in a variety of situations. The advantage of the d'Arsonval chronometer was its portability and its simplicity. This article presents this chronometer and its advantages and drawbacks. The Hipp chronoscope and the d'Arsonval chronometer were the most commonly used apparatuses in Europe for the measurement of RTs until World War II, as is demonstrated by the catalogues of the time (Zimmermann and Boulitte).

Epistemological Dizziness in the Psychology Laboratory: Lively Subjects, Anxious Experimenters, and Experimental Relations, 1950-1970

Since the demise of introspective techniques in the early twentieth century, experimental psychology has largely assumed an administrative arrangement between experimenters and subjects wherein subjects respond to experimenters' instructions and experimenters meticulously constrain that relationship through experimental controls. During the postwar era this standard arrangement came to be questioned, initiating reflections that resonated with Cold War anxieties about the nature of the subjects and the experimenters alike. Albeit relatively short lived, these interrogations of laboratory relationships gave rise to unconventional testimonies and critiques of experimental method and epistemology. Researchers voiced serious concerns about the honesty and normality of subjects, the politics of the laboratory, and their own experimental conduct. Their reflective commentaries record the intimacy of subject and experimenter relations and the plentiful cultural materials that constituted the experimental situation, revealing the permeable boundaries between laboratory and everyday life.

No man is an island. A personal tribute to Bob Blanchard and ethoexperimental approaches to the study of behaviour

I first met Bob Blanchard at an international conference in Paris some 40 years ago. We collaborated intensively during the late 1980s/early 1990s on the ethopharmacology of antipredator defence in wild and laboratory rats, and remained good friends until his untimely passing in November 2013. Bob will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most influential behavioural neuroscientists of the 20th century and, with Caroline, the most eloquent advocate of ethoexperimental approaches to the study of behaviour. In this brief trip down memory lane, I describe when and where Bob and I first met and how, over a lengthy period, he directly and indirectly helped shape my own research career. His profound influence in this regard is illustrated by reference to not only our collaborative research on antipredator behaviour but also my other work on the ethopharmacology of agonistic behaviour, social conflict analgesia, anxiety, and appetite. The element common to all of this work has been ethoexperimental analysis and, for teaching me the true value of this approach, I shall always remain indebted to the big man. Literally and figuratively, Bob was most certainly larger than life.

Making animals alcoholic: shifting laboratory models of addiction

The use of animals as experimental organisms has been critical to the development of addiction research from the nineteenth century. They have been used as a means of generating reliable data regarding the processes of addiction that was not available from the study of human subjects. Their use, however, has been far from straightforward. Through focusing on the study of alcoholism, where the nonhuman animal proved a most reluctant collaborator, this paper will analyze the ways in which scientists attempted to deal with its determined sobriety and account for their consistent failure to replicate the volitional consumption of ethanol to the point of physical dependency. In doing so, we will see how the animal model not only served as a means of interrogating a complex pathology, but also came to embody competing definitions of alcoholism as a disease process, and alternative visions for the very structure and purpose of a research field.

Screening the psychological laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, psychotechnics, and the cinema, 1892-1916

According to Hugo Münsterberg, the direct application of experimental psychology to the practical problems of education, law, industry, and art belonged by definition to the domain of psychotechnics. Whether in the form of pedagogical prescription, interrogation technique, hiring practice, or aesthetic principle, the psychotechnical method implied bringing the psychological laboratory to bear on everyday life. There were, however, significant pitfalls to leaving behind the putative purity of the early psychological laboratory in pursuit of technological utility. In the Vocation Bureau, for example, psychological instruments were often deemed too intimidating for a public unfamiliar with the inner workings of experimental science. Similarly, when psychotechnical means were employed by big business in screening job candidates, ethical red flags were raised about this new alliance between science and capital. This tension was particularly evident in Münsterberg's collaboration with the Paramount Pictures Corporation in 1916. In translating psychological tests into short experimental films, Münsterberg not only envisioned a new mass medium for the dissemination of psychotechnics, but a means by which to initiate the masses into the culture of experimental psychology.

The visual cliff's forgotten menagerie: rats, goats, babies, and myth-making in the history of psychology

Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk's famous visual cliff experiment is one of psychology's classic studies, included in most introductory textbooks. Yet the famous version which centers on babies is actually a simplification, the result of disciplinary myth-making. In fact the visual cliff's first subjects were rats, and a wide range of animals were tested on the cliff, including chicks, turtles, lambs, kid goats, pigs, kittens, dogs, and monkeys. The visual cliff experiment was more accurately a series of experiments, employing varying methods and a changing apparatus, modified to test different species. This paper focuses on the initial, nonhuman subjects of the visual cliff, resituating the study in its original experimental logic, connecting it to the history of comparative psychology, Gibson's interest in comparative psychology, as well as gender-based discrimination. Recovering the visual cliff's forgotten menagerie helps to counter the romanticization of experimentation by focusing on the role of extrascientific factors, chance, complexity, and uncertainty in the experimental process.

The role of a laboratory of experimental psychology in the Brazilian education renewal of the 1930s

In this article, we present the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Belo Horizonte Teachers College (Escola de Aperfeiçoamento de Professores de Belo Horizonte) during its early years (1929-1932). The Laboratory is examined in the context of the prevailing public discourse on primary education and its renewal in Brazil. To achieve our goal, we describe the Belo Horizonte Teachers College and its Laboratory's director, tools, and functions. In presenting these aspects, we highlight the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology as an important place that promoted contact with psychological instruments, techniques, and theories. It contributed to the training of teachers and produced psychological knowledge for elementary education in Brazil.

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The study of the subjective experience of time constitutes a classical research program of experimental psychology developed in many European laboratories during the first half of the twentieth century. Investigations of this kind were conducted also in Italy with research developed during the twenties in the psychological laboratory of the Institute of Higher Studies in Florence. In this context Enzo Bonaventura made an original contribution that was recognized and discussed also on an international level. The present paper would like to illustrate the theoretical methodological approach elaborated, and the results achieved, by this Italian researcher, with particular reference to the experimental techniques and instruments that he designed and created for this purpose. The experimental methodology in the study of the experience of time required the use of particularly precise instruments, by means of which it would be possible to arrive at the measurement and acquisition of quantitative data. In his study of the temporal experience, the Italian psychologist concentrated his attention especially on the presenting in succession of visual or auditory stimuli - all comprised in different comprehensive brief temporal intervals - and on the measure of the perceived temporal experience of time which the subject referred with an introspective act. The tachistoscope was the prince of instruments in this type of research, since it offered the possibility of presenting a visual stimulus for a very brief and measurable time. From the comparison between the classical tachistoscope, widespread in the European laboratories since the time of Wundt, and that modified by Bonaventura, there emerge substantial differences, not only and not so much on account of their diverse capabilities of performance, but especially because of the differences in the theoretical models and investigative objectives underlying such instruments.

Enrico Morselli's Psychology and "Spiritism": psychiatry, psychology and psychical research in Italy in the decades around 1900

This paper traces Enrico Morselli's intellectual trajectory from the 1870s to the early 1900s. His interest in phenomena of physical mediumship is considered against the backdrop of the theoretical developments in Italian psychiatry and psychology. A leading positivist psychiatrist and a prolific academic, Morselli was actively involved in the making of Italian experimental psychology. Initially sceptical of psychical research and opposed to its association with the 'new psychology', Morselli subsequently conducted a study of the physical phenomena produced by the medium Eusapia Palladino. He concluded that her phenomena were genuine and represented them as the effects of an unknown bio-psychic force present in all human beings. By contextualizing Morselli's study of physical mediumship within contemporary theoretical and disciplinary discourse, this study elaborates shifts in the interpretations of 'supernormal' phenomena put forward by leading Italian psychiatrists and physiologists. It demonstrates that Morselli's interest in psychical research stems from his efforts to comprehend the determinants of complex psychological phenomena at a time when the dynamic theory of matter in physics, and the emergence of neo-vitalist theories influenced the theoretical debates in psychiatry, psychology and physiology.

Clever Hans and his effects: Karl Krall and the origins of experimental parapsychology in Germany

Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, the so-called Elberfeld horses, the counting and speaking animals, were among the most debated subjects of the newborn comparative psychology. Yet, they have left little trace in the historiography of this discipline, mostly as an appendix of the more famous Clever Hans. Their story is generally told as the prelude to the triumph of reductionistic experimental psychology. By paying a more scrupulous attention than has so far being done to the second life of Hans, and to the endeavours of his second master, Karl Krall, this article explores the story of the Elberfeld horses as an important, if so far neglected, chapter in the history of experimental parapsychology.

The instruments in the first psychological laboratory in Mexico: antecedents, influence, and methods

Enrique O. Aragón established the first psychological laboratory in Mexico in 1916. This laboratory was inspired by Wundt's laboratory and by those created afterward in Germany and the United States. It was equipped with state-of-the art instruments imported from Germany in 1902 from Ernst Zimmermann who supplied instruments for Wundt's laboratory. Although previous authors have described the social events leading to the creation of the laboratory, there are limited descriptions of the instruments, their use, and their influence. With the aid of archival resources, the initial location of the laboratory was determined. The analysis of instruments revealed a previously overlooked relation with a previous laboratory of experimental physiology. The influence of the laboratory was traced by describing the careers of 4 students, 3 of them women, who worked with the instruments during the first 2 decades of the 20th century, each becoming accomplished scholars. In addition, this article, by identifying and analyzing the instruments shown in photographs of the psychological laboratory and in 1 motion film, provides information of the class demonstrations and the experiments conducted in this laboratory.

Pavlov and Associationism

Pavlov's contribution to experimental psychology was to invent a technique that allowed him to undertake a prolonged and systematic series of well-controlled experiments that, astonishingly enough, uncovered many if not most of the phenomena of what is rightly called Pavlovian conditioning. It was not for another 30 years or more that English-speaking psychologists began to match that achievement. Of course there have been new developments and discoveries since his time. Two examples are discussed: the important role of variable associability or attention even in simple conditioning, and the rigorous application of associative learning theory to the behavior of adult humans.

Contemporary Study of Pavlovian Conditioning

Pavlov's first report on conditioning emphasized its role in allowing the animal to adjust to its environment. Contemporary theories have seen this adjustment in terms of developing accurate knowledge of the environment. Three aspects of that thinking are explored: how the animal acquires initial knowledge, how it changes its knowledge when conditions of the world change, and how it makes use of multiple knowledge representations.

Signalization and Stimulus-Substitution in Pavlov's Theory of Conditioning

The concept of conditioning as signalization proposed by Ivan P. Pavlov (1927, 1928) is studied in relation to the theory of stimulus-substitution, which is also attributed to him. In the so-called theory of stimulus-substitution a distinction must be made between an empirical principle of substitution and an actual theory of substitution, which can adopt different forms. The Pavlovian theory of substitution—which conceives substitution as a substitution of the unconditioned stimulus (US) by the conditioned stimulus (CS) in the activation of the representation of the former—can be understood as an explanation or model of signalization. Signalization and substitution are answers to different questions, and the level of analysis to which signalization corresponds, is that which concerns the nature of conditioning as an operation of the animal in the environment.

The emergence and development of Bekhterev's psychoreflexology in relation to Wundt's experimental psychology

After its foundation, the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology at Leipzig University became an international center for psychological research, attracting students from all over the world. The Russian physiologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev (1857-1927) was one of Wilhelm Wundt's students in 1885, and after returning to Russia he continued enthusiastically his experimental research on mental phenomena. However, he gradually distanced himself from Wundt's psychological project and developed a new concept of psychology: the so-called Objective Psychology or Psychoreflexology. The goal of this paper is to analyze Bekhterev's position in relation to Wundt's experimental psychology, by showing how the former came to reject the latter's conception of psychology. The results indicate that Bekhterev's development of a philosophical program, including his growing interest in establishing a new Weltanschauung is the main reason behind his divergence with Wundt, which is reflected in his conception of scientific psychology. Despite this, Wundt remained alive in Bekhterev's mind as an ideal counterpoint.

HERBERT SPENCER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS: A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW OF PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY

Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855, first edition) was regarded by his contemporaries, including William James and John Dewey, as a major contribution to what was then a very new discipline. In this book he first expounded his ideas about both evolution of species and how behavior of the individual organism adapts through interaction with the environment. His formulation of the principle that behavior changes in adaptation to the environment is closely related to the version of the law of effect propounded some years later by Thorndike. He can thus be seen as the first proponent of selectionism, a key tenet of behavior analysis. He also explicitly attacked the then prevailing view of free will as being incompatible with the biologically grounded view of psychological processes that he was advocating, and thus put forward ideas that were precursors of B. F. Skinner's in this important area of debate.

Animal tales: observations of the emotions in American experimental psychology, 1890-1940

In nineteenth-century science, the emotions played a crucial role in explaining the social behavior of animals and human beings. Beginning in the 1890s, however, the first American psychologists, resolutely parsimonious in method, dismissed affective experience as intellectually imprecise. Yet in practice, feelings continued to influence at least one research setting: animal experiments. Laboratory reports, although focused on learning, became a repository of informal observations about the animals' temperaments and moods. When American psychologists began to reexamine the emotions between the world wars, they drew on this empirical legacy in animal studies. They also devised a conceptual approach to emotion consistent with their expectation of experimental precision.

Husserl's Crisis as a crisis of psychology

This paper places Husserl's mature work, The Crisis of the European Sciences, in the context of his engagement with--and critique of--experimental psychology at the time. I begin by showing (a) that Husserl accorded psychology a crucial role in his philosophy, i.e., that of providing a scientific analysis of subjectivity, and (b) that he viewed contemporary psychology--due to its naturalism--as having failed to pursue this goal in the appropriate manner. I then provide an analysis of Husserl's views about naturalism and scientific philosophy. Some central themes of the Crisis are traced back to Husserl's earlier work and to his relationship with his teacher, Franz Brentano, with whom he disagreed about the status of "inner perception" as the proper scientific method for a phenomenological analysis. The paper then shows that Husserl was well aware of at least one publication about the crisis of psychology (Bühler's 1927 book), and it teases out some aspects of the complicated relationship between Husserl and members of the Würzburg School of thought psychology: The latter had drawn on Husserl's writings, but Husserl felt that they had misunderstood his central thesis. I conclude by placing Husserl's work in the wider context of scientific, cultural, and political crisis-discourses at the time.

Koffka, Köhler, and the "crisis" in psychology

This paper examines the claims of the Gestalt psychologists that there was a crisis in experimental psychology ca. 1900, which arose because the prevailing sensory atomism excluded meaning from among psychological phenomena. The Gestaltists claim that a primary motivation of their movement was to show, against the speculative psychologists and philosophers and Verstehen historians, that natural scientific psychology can handle meaning. Purportedly, they revealed this motivation in their initial German-language presentations but in English emphasized their scientific accomplishments for an American audience. The paper finds that: there was a recognized crisis in the new experimental psychology ca. 1900 pertaining especially to sensory atomism; that the Gestaltists responded to the crisis with new experimental findings and theoretical concepts (Gestalten) that challenged atomism; in both languages, they raised problems of meaning and discussed the contest with speculative psychology and philosophy only after presenting their scientific case; that they introduced phenomenological observations on meaning and perceptual organization into their psychology but did not develop a theory of meaning or solve philosophical problems; that they argued "philosophically," that is, using abstract, conceptual arguments; and that this aspect of their cognitive style was not received well by some prominent members of their American audience.

Has psychology "found its true path"? Methods, objectivity, and cries of "crisis" in early twentieth-century French psychology

This article explores how French psychologists understood the state of their field during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and whether they thought it was in crisis. The article begins with the Russian-born psychologist Nicolas Kostyleff and his announcement in 1911 that experimental psychology was facing a crisis. After briefly situating Kostyleff, the article examines his analysis of the troubles facing experimental psychology and his proposed solution, as well as the rather muted response his diagnosis received from the French psychological community. The optimism about the field evident in many of the accounts surveying French psychology during the early twentieth century notwithstanding, a few others did join Kostyleff in declaring that all was not well with experimental psychology. Together their pronouncements suggest that under the surface, important unresolved issues faced the French psychological community. Two are singled out: What was the proper methodology for psychology as a positive science? And what kinds of practices could claim to be objective, and in what sense? The article concludes by examining what these anxieties reveal about the type of science that French psychologists hoped to pursue.

"Shocking" masculinity: Stanley Milgram, "obedience to authority," and the "crisis of manhood" in Cold War America

Stanley Milgram's study of "obedience to authority" is one of the best-known psychological experiments of the twentieth century. This essay examines the study's special charisma through a detailed consideration of the intellectual, cultural, and gender contexts of Cold War America. It suggests that Milgram presented not a "timeless" experiment on "human nature" but, rather, a historically contingent, scientifically sanctioned "performance" of American masculinity at a time of heightened male anxiety. The essay argues that this gendered context invested the obedience experiments with an extraordinary plausibility, immediacy, and relevance. Immersed in a discourse of masculinity besieged, many Americans read the obedience experiments not as a fanciful study of laboratory brutality but as confirmation of their worst fears. Milgram's extraordinary success thus lay not in his "discovery" of the fragility of individual conscience but in his theatrical flair for staging culturally relevant masculine performances.

The role of tone sensation and musical stimuli in early experimental psychology

In this article, the role of music in early experimental psychology is examined. Initially, the research of Wilhelm Wundt is considered, as tone sensation and musical elements appear as dominant factors in much of his work. It is hypothesized that this approach was motivated by an understanding of psychology that dates back to Christian Wolff 's focus on sensation in his empirical psychology of 1732. Wolff, however, had built his systematization of psychology on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who combined perception with mathematics,and referred to music as the area in which sensation is united with numerical exactitude. Immanuel Kant refused to accept empirical psychology as a science, whereas Johann Friedrich Herbart reintroduced the scientific basis of empirical psychology by, among other things, referring to music.

Scientific objectivity and E. B. Titchener's experimental psychology

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's recent book on the history of scientific objectivity showed that, over the course of the nineteenth century, natural scientists of many stripes became intensely concerned with the issue of the distorting influence that their own subjectivities might be having on their observations and representations of nature. At very nearly the same time, experimental psychology arose specifically to investigate scientifically the nature and structure of subjective consciousness. Although Daston and Galison briefly discussed some basic psychological issues-especially the discovery of differences in human color perception-they did not strongly connect the widespread European concern with scientific objectivity to the rise of experimental psychology. This essay critically examines the theoretical and empirical activities of the experimental psychologist who most energetically strove to discover the structure of subjective conscious experience, Edward Bradford Titchener. Titchener's efforts to produce an objective study of subjectivity reveal important tensions in early experimental psychology and also serve to situate experimental psychology at the center of an important intellectual struggle that was being waged across the natural sciences in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

The 1928 Carlisle conference: Knight Dunlap and a national laboratory for psychology

In late March 1928, 32 experimental psychologists met in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The National Research Council (NRC) sponsored the conference, which was organized by Knight Dunlap, chair of the NRC's Division of Anthropology and Psychology. The purpose of the Carlisle conference was to examine the status of experimental psychology, and Dunlap used it to propose a national laboratory for psychology, to be created in Washington, DC. This vision clashed with the traditional university-centered research model and the group resisted Dunlap's plan. Dunlap persisted, the eventual result being a National Institute of Psychology, which accomplished little. The Carlisle conference did succeed in being the impetus for small NRC-funded grants-in-aid to researchers, and it set in motion events that eventually led to the American Psychological Association publication manual.

Scientific biography, cognitive deficits, and laboratory practice. James McKeen Cattell and early American experimental psychology, 1880-1904

Despite widespread interest in individual life histories, few biographies of scientists make use of insights derived from psychology, another discipline that studies people, their thoughts, and their actions. This essay argues that recent theoretical work in psychology and tools developed for clinical psychological practice can help biographical historians of science create and present fuller portraits of their subjects' characters and temperaments and more nuanced analyses of how these traits helped shape their subjects' scientific work. To illustrate this thesis, the essay examines the early career of James McKeen Cattell--an influential late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experimental psychologist--through a lens offered by psychology and argues that Cattell's actual laboratory practices derived from an "accommodation" to a long-standing "cognitive deficit." These practices in turn enabled Cattell to achieve more precise experimental results than could any of his contemporaries; and their students readily adopted them, along with their behavioral implications. The essay concludes that, in some ways, American psychology's early twentieth-century move toward a behavioral understanding of psychological phenomena can be traced to Cattell's personal cognitive deficit. It closes by reviewing several "remaining general questions" that this thesis suggests.

Physiological optics, cognition and emotion: a novel look at the early work of Wilhelm Wundt

The German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt, who later founded experimental psychology, arguably developed the first modern scientific conception of emotion. In the first edition of Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele (Lectures on human and animal psychology), which was published in 1863, Wundt tried to establish that emotions were essential parts of rational thought. In fact, he considered them unconscious steps of decision-making that were implied in all processes of conscious thought. His early work deserves attention not only because it is the attempt to conceptualize cognition and emotion strictly from a neural point of view but also because it represents the very foundation of the debate about the nature of emotion that revolved around William James' theory of emotion during the 1890s. However, this aspect of his work is little known because scholars who have analyzed Wundt's work focused on his late career. Furthermore, historical analysis interpreted Wundt's work within a philosophical framework, rather than placing it in the context of German medical and physiological research in which it belongs. In addition, Wundt's early works are hardly available to an English speaking audience because they were never translated.