PSY270H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Hermann Ebbinghaus, Franciscus Donders, Wilhelm Wundt
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PSY270H1 Full Course Notes
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In between these two, there occurs the mental response (perceiving the light. Or perceiving the light and deciding which button to push). Wundt"s approach was structuralism; which says that our overall experience is determined by sensations. Wundt wanted to create a periodic table of the mind, with sensations. He used a quantitative method, with himself as a subject, memorizing a list of 13 nonsense syllables. He used a measure called savings= (original time to learn the list) - (time to relearn the list after the delay). Longer delay (waiting time b/w each learning session) = smaller savings= more forgetting: the savings curve (forgetting curve): memory drops rapidly after 2 days of initial learning, and then levels off. Ebbinghaus is important he found this, which showed that memory could be quantified: william james (early american psychologist), observed operations of his own mind. One example: paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things.
