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Distractions in classroom and student performance
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Hermann Vonn Ebbinghaus Hermann Vonn Ebbinghaus was a German experimental psychologist. He was born the son of Lutheran merchants in Barman, Germany on January 24, 1850. At the age of 17 he began studying philosophy and history at the University of Bonn from 1867 to 1870. He later received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1873 after returning from his duty with the Prussian army. Ebbinghaus began travelling the continent both lecturing and studying. During his travels he stumbled upon a copy of Psychophysics by Gustav Theodor Fechner. This sparked an interest in "higher mental processes" and the problem that Wilhelm Wundt failed to solve experimentally. Wundt was the first to establish a laboratory for psychological experimentation. This left Ebbinghaus to study the error Wundt made regarding these higher mental processes. He began doing so using himself as the subject of the experiments. This would eventually result in his well known work translated as On Memory in 1885. Ebbinghaus invented what is known as the relearning task in which information is learned, set aside for a period of time, then relearned with the same criterion for accuracy. He measured the retention of memory and compared it to the original learning session. He coined the term "savings score" which is the amount of information that is retained (in terms of trials) or learned in comparison to the original learning task. In more simple terms the savings score would be represented as the amount of information saved in memory so that it did not need to be relearned. An example would be as follows: if it took 6 trials to originally learn some particular information, but only 3 trials after the relearning task, then 3 of 6 trials had been successfully encoded. This would represent a savings score of 50 percent. Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables to demonstrate this experiment. Nonsense syllables are three letter combinations usually consisting of a consonant-vowel-consonant combination. These combinations which included some 2300, were not word and therefore did not make sense, hence the term "nonsense." He used these so-called nonsense syllables in order to discourage how the prior existence of the meanings may influence learning of the present. He used nonsense syllables in order to prevent complications in the experiment and its results.
When Otto von Bismarck was recalled from Paris to become Minister-President of Prussia in 1862, German nationalism was already more than 40 years old. First apparent in the opposition to Napoleon´s occupation of the German states, national feeling grew into a movement after 1815. This feeling was encouraged by a growth of interest in German literature and music and by increased economic cooperation between the north German states. By 1848 it was strong enough to make the creation of a united Germany one of the main demands of the revolutionaries. Otto von Bismarck was a Prussian patriot who inherited the traditions of love of king, army and country from his family.
Born in Gotha, Germany in 1752, Blumenbach went on to Jena to study medicine. He completed his doctoral training at Gottingen in 1775. Just a year later, he was appointed as an extraordinary professor of medicine. His study of the history of man showing the value of using comparative anatomy and his classification of the five varieties of man were two important contributions made by Blumenbach (1911 Edition). He wasted no time in becoming one of the most influential members of the fields of comparative anatomy, zoology, physiology, anthropology, and craniology, in fact, Blumenbach is considered to be the founder of anthropology as well as craniology. In his construction of this new field of physical anthropology, he used the methods of natural historians, and applied those methods to the human species (Keith 106). Objectifying the study of mankind, Blumenbach collected numerous specimens from various races. Skulls, skin, hair and pictures were among the items collected. From each item, the location, as well as race of the item, was known and recorded. Prior to Blumenbach's systematized assortment of specimens, the only collections "consisted of miscellaneous oddities preserved in the 'cabinets' of noble houses, for the idle amusement of the curious." (Keith, 106). Blumenbach' s more complete collection allowed intensive study into the racial history of mankind, which is just what he wanted to do. Blumenbach was also the first to study the actual form of skulls (Retzius 283).
"We could describe (Heinrich) Schliemann's excavations on the hill of Hissarlik and consider their results without speaking of Troy or even alluding to it," Georges Perrot wrote in 1891 in his Journal des Savants. "Even then, they would have added a whole new chapter to the history of civilization, the history of art" (qtd. in Duchêne 87). Heinrich Schliemann's life is the stuff fairy tales are made of. A poor, uneducated, and motherless boy rises through his hard work and parsimonious lifestyle to the heights of wealth (Burg 1,2). He travels the world and learns its languages ("Heinrich Schliemann"), takes a beautiful Greek bride, and together they unearth the treasures of Troy and the citadel of Agamemnon, thereby fulfilling the dream he has chased since childhood (Calder 18,19; Burg 8). Indeed, by presenting his life in romantic autobiographies as a series of adventures, starring Heinrich Schliemann as the epic hero (Duchêne 14), he ensured his status as a lasting folk hero and perennial bestseller (Calder 19).
Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kessewil, Switzerland. He lived between 1875 and 1961 and was the only son of his father, a protestant clergyman. His extended family had good educational background and although quite a number of them were clergymen, he plumped for higher education. Jung became a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who developed analytical psychology. Owing to his personal experience, he postulated the concepts of introversion and extraversion personality, collective unconscious and individuation resulting in the study of integration and wholeness.
He was an empiricist, meaning he had to make logical or empirical connections in order for something to be cognitively meaningful. “There is a great difference between the system of logical interconnections of thought and the actual way in which thinking processes are performed. The psychological operations of thinking are rather vague and fluctuating processes; they almost never keep to the ways prescribed by logic and may even skip whole groups of operations which would be needed for a complete exposition of the subject in question. That is valid for thinking in daily life, as well as for the mental procedure of a man of science, who is confronted by the task of finding logical interconnections between divergent ideas about newly observed facts”. This quote from Reichenbach describes a profound problem in science. This problem is taking scientific knowledge from a scientists ideas and being able to present them to the public. Reichenbach believed that if you are unable to speak about the subject you are studying, then you do not have real knowledge of the subject. Reichenbach describes the thought processes of scientists as “psychology”. The underlying theme behind Reichenbach’s philosophy is proving that the works of many scientists that have been published are usually jargon and not supported fully. Hans Reichenbach says that even though the scientists may have the missing facts in his mind, they are not always portrayed in the work they present. This poses a huge problem; society therefore then is not able to help with such findings because they may be missing key basic facts that are essential in furthering this scientists ideas. In my opinion I believe a lot of scientists purposely leave out certain psychological dynamics in an experiment. A prime example being Leeuwenhoek. Leeuwenhoek took this to an extreme by even lying to colleagues about his work. I believe this is common practice because a
Tulving, E. (1985). Ebbinghaus’s memory: What did he learn and remember? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11, 485-490.
grew up in Europe and spent his young adult life under the direction of Freud. In 1933
The way the experiment was set it; the researches got college students to learn a list of foreign words that they have never seen before. They were given a bunch of words in Swahili-English words. The list contained 40 wor...
Rieber, R. W. (2001). Wilhelm Wundt in history: the making of a scientific psychology. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
Psychologist, born in Susquhanna, Pa. He studied at Harvard, teaching there (1931-6, 1947-74). A leading behaviorist, he is a proponent of operant conditioning, and the inventor of the Skinner box for facilitating experimental observations.
Buchanan, R. D. (2011). Research report: Doing a biography of Hans J. Eysenck. History Of Psychology, 14(2), 210-213. doi:10.1037/a0023481b
His pursuit of knowledge became even more important when he entered the university of Ingolstadt. He "read with ardour" (35) and soon become "so ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of the morning whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory" (35). He was a proud product of the Enlightenment...
A biography called “Otto Von Bismarck: Iron Chancellor of Germany” was written by Kimberley Heuston. She was born in 1960 in Utah, Provo. She got her Bachelor Degree in history and science, at Harvard University, and an MFA in children’s literature at Vermont Collage. Later she worked as an English and history teacher. Also, Kimberley Heuston was awarded by Association for Mormon letter and for young-adult literature.
One of the first psychologists to research memory was James in 1890. James was the first person to make the distinction between primary and secondary memory, which corresponds with short-term, and long-term memory, without this distinction then the MSM could not have been created.
The profession of psychology has been around since the time of the Greeks, but did not develop into its own discipline until around the late 1800s. A German physiologist named Wilhelm Wundt began using scientific research methods in order to investigate reaction times. He also was the first person to make the association between physiology and human thought and behavior. In 1879, he opened the first psychology lab at the University of Leipzig. This event has been said to be the official beginning of psychology as a separate scientific discipline (Landrum). Over the years, many influential people have helped the profession of psychology experience a dynamic evolution into various subfields