Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [85]
The casual onlooker might see little difference between the two cases, but the researchers, after a great many trials and chronoscope readings, find that the first kind of reaction, involving awareness of one’s perception of the sound followed by a conscious voluntary response, usually takes about two tenths of a second; the second kind, involving a purely muscular or reflexive response, takes only about one tenth of a second.16
These findings seem like mere crumbs of psychology, but there are other differences, more revealing than duration, between the two forms of the experiment. The subjects, having been trained in introspection, report that when their attention is focused on their awareness of hearing the sound, they experience a clear, though fluctuating, mental image of what they expect to hear, a minor, wavering sense of strain, mild surprise when they hear the sound, and a strong motivation to press the key. In the reflexive form of the experiment, on the other hand, they experience a feeble mental image of the expected sound, a considerable sense of strain, strong surprise when the ball drops, and an impulse to press the key almost without consciously willing to. Thus the experiment measures not only the different times taken by conscious volition and reflexive volition but identifies the conscious processes that take place in the self-aware version of this simple act.17
Despite the focus on conscious mental processes, the researchers look only at the basic components of those processes. Wundt had boldly proclaimed years earlier that experiments could explore the psyche, but now he feels that they can do so only for sensations or perceptions and feelings—the elemental materials of consciousness—and the connections among them. He says that higher mental processes, including complex thoughts, are “of too variable a character to be the subjects of objective observation.”18 He argues that language, concept formation, and other high-level cognitive functions can be studied only by observation, particularly of general trends among groups of people.19
Wundt defines a scientific psychological experiment as one in which a known, controlled physiological stimulus—the “antecedent variable,” he calls it—is applied and the individual’s responses observed and measured. Helmholtz and others had already done that but confined their observations to the individual’s visible reactions; Wundt’s great contribution is the use of his kind of introspection to gain quantitative information about the subject’s conscious inner reactions, though he limits these to the simplest feeling states.
During the laboratory’s first two decades, about a hundred major experimental research studies and numerous minor ones were conducted there. Many dealt with sensation and perception, and were generally along the same lines as the work of Weber, Helmholtz, and Fechner. But the laboratory’s most original and important findings came from its studies of “mental chronometry,” the measuring of the time required by particular mental processes and the interactions among them.
Still others introduced a number of complications in order to invoke and measure a variety of mental processes. For instance, by having several possible stimuli and responses—a stimulus might come in any of four different colors, each calling for a different kind of response—the experimenter could extend the inquiry to include discrimination and choice.20
Other studies concerned the boundary between perception and apperception. In a notable one, the experimenter flashed a group of letters or words very briefly through a slit in a revolving drum; the subject “perceived” them (saw them at the periphery of awareness, without having time to recognize