PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES AND PROPONENTS

Wilhelm Wundt

STRUCTURALISM

Wilhelm Wundt, the son of a Lutheran clergyman, was born in 1832 in a small German village called Nekarau. He was a solitary child who shunned the games of children in favor of books and study.
            At 19 Wundt decided to study medicine, most likely as a means of entering a scientific career. His attention shifted to physiology, the field in which he lectured widely and published a number of articles during the years following his graduation. Psychology was just beginning to emerge as a distinct science, and much of Wundt's work anticipated the value of physiological methodology in dealing with psychological problems.
            In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt established the first psychology laboratory. Here, he concentrated almost exclusively on psychological research, particularly on the study of human sensory experience--research that had previously belonged to the realm of physiology and philosophy. Wundt's use of a systematic methodological approach in tackling psychological problems was a landmark in establishing psychology as a science.
             Wundt pursued his work with the boundless energy and enthusiasm up until the time of his death near Leipzig, two weeks after his 88th birthday in 1920.

 

Hermann von Helmholtz

CONTRUCTIVISM

Hermann Helmholtz was one of the few scientists to master two disciplines: medicine and physics. He conducted breakthrough research on the nervous system,as well as the functions of the eye and ear. In physics, he isrecognized (along with two other scientists) as the author of the concept ofconservation of energy.

Helmholtz was born into a poor but scholarly family; his father was an instructor of philosophy and literature at a gymnasium in his hometown of Potsdam,Germany. At home, his father taught him Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic, as well as the philosophical ideas of Immanuel Kant and J. G. Fichte (who was a friend of the family). With this background, Helmholtz entered school with a wide perspective. Though he expressed an interest in the sciences, his father could not afford to send him to a university; instead, he was persuaded to study medicine, an area that would provide him with government aid. In return, Helmholtz was expected to use his medical skills for the good of the government--particularly in army hospitals.

Helmholtz entered the Friedrich Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1898, receiving his M.D. four years later. Upon graduation he was immediately assigned to military duty, practicing as a surgeon for the Prussian army. After several years of active duty he was discharged, free to pursue a career in academia. In1848 he secured a position as lecturer at the Berlin Academy of Arts. Just ayear later he was offered a professorship at the University of Konigsberg, teaching physiology. Over the next twenty-two years he moved to the universities at Bonn and Heidelberg, and it was during this time that he conducted hismajor works in the field of medicine.

Helmholtz began to study the human eye, a task that was all the more difficult for the lack of precise medical equipment. In order to better understand the function of the eye he invented the ophthalmoscope, a device used to observe the retina. Invented in 1851, the ophthalmoscope--in a slightly modified form--is still used by modern eye specialists. Helmholtz also designed a deviceused to measure the curvature of the eye called an ophthalmometer. Using these devices he advanced the theory of three-color vision first proposed by Thomas Young. This theory, now called the Young-Helmholtz theory, helps ophthalmologists to understand the nature of color blindness and other afflictions.

Intrigued by the inner workings of the sense organs, Helmholtz went on to study the human ear. Being an expert pianist, he was particularly concerned withthe way the ear distinguished pitch and tone. He suggested that the inner ear is structured in such a way as to cause resonations at certain frequencies.This allowed the ear to discern similar tones, overtones, and timbres, suchas an identical note played by two different instruments.

In 1852 Helmholtz conducted what was probably his most important work as a physician: the measurement of the speed of a nerve impulse. It had been assumedthat such a measurement could never be obtained by science, since the speedwas far too great for instruments to catch. Some physicians even used this asproof that living organisms were powered by an innate "vital force" rather than energy. Helmholtz disproved this by stimulating a frog's nerve first neara muscle and then farther away; when the stimulus was farther from the muscle, it contracted just a little slower. After a few simple calculations Helmholtz announced the impulse velocity within the nervous system to be about one-tenth the speed of sound.

After completing much of the work on sensory physiology that had interested him, Helmholtz found himself bored with medicine. In 1868 he decided to returnto his first love--physical science. However, it was not until 1870 that hewas offered the physics chair at the University of Berlin and only after it had been turned down by Gustav Kirchhoff. By that time, Helmholtz had alreadycompleted his groundbreaking research on energetics.

The concept of conservation of energy was introduced by Julius Mayer in 1842,but Helmholtz was unaware of Mayer's work. Helmholtz conducted his own research on energy, basing his theories upon his previous experience with muscles.It could be observed that animal heat was generated by muscle action, as well as chemical reactions within a working muscle. Helmholtz believed that thisenergy was derived from food and that food got its energy from the sun. He proposed that energy could not be created spontaneously, nor could it vanish--it was either used or released as heat. This explanation was much clearer andmore detailed than the one offered by Mayer, and Helmholtz is often considered the true originator of the concept of conservation of energy.

While this was undoubtedly Helmholtz's greatest legacy, he also began severalprojects that were later completed by other scientists. He advanced a numberof hypotheses on electromagnetic radiation, speculating that it lay far intothe invisible ranges of the spectrum. This line of research was later resumed, very successfully, by one of Helmholtz's students, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz,the discoverer of radio waves. Helmholtz's theories on electrolysis were also the basis for future work conducted by Svante August Arrhenius.

Helmholtz had been a sickly child; even throughout his adult life he was plagued by migraine headaches and dizzy spells. In 1894, shortly after a lecture tour of the United States, he fainted and fell, suffering a concussion. He never completely recovered, dying of complications several monthslater.

James Jerome Gibson

ECOLOGICAL

(January 27, 1904–December 11, 1979), was an American psychologist who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology, and is considered one of the most important 20th century psychologists in the field of visual perception. In his classic work The Perception of the Visual World (1950) he rejected the fashionable behaviorism for a view based on his own experimental work, which pioneered the idea that animals 'sampled' information from the 'ambient' outside world. He also coined the term 'affordance', meaning the interactive possibilities of a particular object or environment. This concept has been extremely influential in the field of design and ergonomics: see for example the work of Donald Norman who worked with Gibson, and has adapted many of his ideas for his own theories. ^[1]

In his later work (such as, for example, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)), Gibson became more philosophical and criticised cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before. Gibson argued strongly in favour of 'direct perception', or 'direct realism' (as pioneered by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid), as opposed to cognitivist 'indirect realism'. He termed his new approach ecological psychology. He also rejected the information processing view of cognition. Gibson is increasingly influential on many contemporary movements in psychology, particularly those considered to be post-cognitivist.

I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20.000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!

From 1928 to 1949 Gibson worked at Smith College. There, he wrote one of his most important books, The Perception of the Visual World (1950). He then went to Cornell University, where he worked and taught for the rest of his career. Gibson is primarily known for his research in, and theories of perception. He became a leader of a new movement in that field by considering perception to be direct, without any inferential steps, intervening variables, or associations. According to his theory, perception is the process of maintaining contact with the world. It is a direct function of stimulation, which he interpreted as the types and variables of physical energy to which the sense organs respond. Gibson formulated the concept of ‘stimulus ecology,’ referring to the stimuli that surround a person. These include the optics of slanting and reflecting surfaces, and the gravitational forces we all experience in walking, sitting, and lying down. He believed in ‘invariance’ of perception, whereby the environment provides an active organism with a continuous and stable flow of information to which it can respond. In 1966 Gibson wrote The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. In it he stressed the importance of texture gradients of surfaces to visual perception. In his last book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), Gibson emphasized the need to study vision in terms of people behaving in the real world performing meaningful tasks rather than subjects responding under the artificial and information-poor conditions of the laboratory.

Jean Piaget

COGNITIVE

Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world, particularly molluscs, and even published a number of papers before he graduated from high school. He published his first scientific paper at the age of ten.^[3] Over the course of his career, Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles.

Piaget received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel, and also studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent thought. His interest in psychoanalysis, a strain of psychological thought burgeoning at that time, can also be dated to this period. He then moved from Switzerland to Paris, France, where he taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles street school for boys run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. It was while he was helping to mark some instances of these intelligence tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children kept making the same pattern of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children's cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. (Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of developmental stages stating that individuals exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of cognition in each period in their development.) In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, one of his students; together, the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau of Education and remained the head of this international organization until 1968. Every year, he drafted his “Director's Speeches” for the IBE Council and for the International Conference on Public Education in which he explicitly expressed his educational credo.

In 1964, Piaget was invited to serve as chief consultant at two conferences at Cornell University (March 11 to March 13) and University of California, Berkeley (March 16 to March 18). The conferences addressed the relationship of cognitive studies and curriculum development and strived to conceive implications of recent investigations of children's cognitive development for curricula.