Psy 525 - Wundt's Laboratory

Running head: WUNDT'S LABORATORY 1

Wundt's Laboratory

Psych/525

August 4, 2012

WUNDT'S LABORATORY 2

Wundt's Laboratory

This paper will discuss the development of psychological

testing concerning Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory. Wundt and his

ideas had a huge impact on the development of psychological

testing as we see it today. This paper will also explore the

historical roots of Wundt's laboratory and its significance.

In Germany, 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt

founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research.

Wundt is known as the "father of experimental psychology." He

is known today as one of the founding figures of modern

psychology.

"Wundt's design of the psychology laboratory had a

reputation of being one of the world's largest and best equipped

laboratories. His laboratory has become the standard for

scientific psychology laboratories throughout the world." (Alan

Kim, 2008) Most people believe that because of Wundt's

laboratory we have been able to learn and use modern aspects of

psychology.

"The initial goal of psychology was to understand the

nature of human consciousness. To understand this, Wundt used

the method of introspection, in which a person experiences

something and then describes the personal nature of the

experience. This technique can be used quite rigorously when

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stimulus presentation is controlled, so that introspective

accounts can be compared across many experiences. Researchers

were to repeat their experiences in terms of specific sensations

and feelings, which were then developed into the basic building

blocks of the conscious mind. The main goal of Wundt's

psychology was to first discover these building blocks, and then

discover how they combined to form the more complex elements of

mental processes." (History of Psychology, 1997)

Wundt separated psychology from philosophy which made him

important. He did this by examining the way the mind works in a

structured way. He put emphasis on control and objective

measurement.

"The research in Wundt's lab consisted of studies in the

fields of sensation and perception: investigating color vision

and the passage of time, as well as research into other mental

processes such as emotion. One famous study in Wundt's lab was

the field of reaction time. Wundt hypothesized that by

measuring the difference between the speed of a simple mental

event and a complex mental event, it was possible to calculate

the amount of time mental processing required." (History of

Psychology, 1997)

There were other types of things that were explored in

Wundt's laboratory. Research in the laboratory consisted of all

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kinds of different types of disorders, the process of abnormal