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Week 3
He popularized the Weber Law based on the study by Ernst Weber. The most common use of psychophysics is in producing scales of human experience of various aspects of physical stimuli. For example the physical stimulus of frequency of sound. Frequency of a sound is measured in hertz, cycles per second. But human experience of the frequencies of sound is not the same as the frequencies in hertz. Doubling the frequency of a sound (e.g., from 100 Hz to 200 Hz) does not lead to a doubling of experience. The perceptual experience of the frequency of sound is called pitch
Helmholtz had also made another major contribution to physiology. Stimulating nerves at various distances from a muscle and measuring the time it took for muscular contraction, he estimated the rate of travel of the nervous impulse, and in the process incidentally introduced the technique of reaction-time into physiology and psychology
In 1879 he took up a position at the University of Leipzig, and almost immediately set up the first two psychological laboratories in the world. To Wundt psychology was the science of experience and studying psychological phenomenon therefore involved studying conscious experience. This research took place in a small classroom that had earlier been assigned to Wundt for use as a storage area.
Wundt introduced Introspection The researcher was to carefully observe some simple event -- one that could be measured as to quality, intensity, or duration -and record his responses to variations of those events Introspection is then a process that allows us to know our inner functioning through what we can gather about the functioning of the external world. His greatest contribution was to show that psychology could be a valid experimental science. His influence in promoting psychology as a science was enormous.
To test his own memory, he first created 2300 nonsense syllables, each consisting of two consonants separated by a vowel (e.g. nog, baf). These syllables were necessary for a controlled experiment because they were presumably free of any previously learned associations. He learned lists of these syllables until he had reached a pre-established criterion (perfect recall), and then recorded how many he was able to retain after specific time intervals. He also noted how many trials were necessary for relearning after the syllables had been forgotten. His published the results in Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology (1885)
Meaningless stimuli are more difficult to memorize than meaningful stimuli (i.e. it is harder to memorize material that does not have significance or relevance to the learner) His data revealed that increasing the amount of material to be learned usually dramatically increases the amount of time it takes to learn it. This is the learning curve. Relearning is easier than initial learning, and that it takes longer to forget material after each subsequent re-learning. Learning is more effective when it is spaced out over time rather than crammed into a single marathon study session. that forgetting happens most rapidly right after learning occurs and slows down over time