ABSTRACT
The experimental study of human learning and memory began a few years earlier than the studies of conditioning and learning described in the previous chapter. They were initiated not long after Wilhelm Wundt’s founding of the first psycho logical laboratory in 1879 and represented a line of experimental investigation that Wundt believed to be impossible. This radical position followed logically from W undt’s definition of the data and methods of psychology. The data were the givens of immediate experience, and the method was introspection. Experi mental psychology must study the conditions that influence the state of con sciousness. Accordingly, the work of the new laboratory concentrated on sensa tion, perception, reaction time, and attention. As for the higher mental processes, Wundt held that they were to be examined by the historical method, an undertaking that he saw as the task of a separate discipline of folk psychology. If Wundt had prevailed, the experimental study of memory would not have become part of the new psychology. He did not prevail, however, because one independent investigator refused to be bound by prejudgments on the scope of psychological experimentation. This investigator was Hermann Ebbinghaus.
