How did psychology become a science and what kind of science did it become?

The first psychology laboratory, given the name ‘new psychology’ by Wundt to distinguish it from the old, came about from an integration of three strands of thinking – it is too much to call them research programmes. These are developments from sensory physiology that provided a scientific approach to the study of sensation, contributions from the philosophy of mind that showed that higher mental processes could be studied, and medical findings that higher or cognitive processes were linked in some way to the brain. Ernst Weber studied anatomy at university and completed his thesis on the anatomy and physiology of sensory nerves at the university of Leipzig. He developed a method for assessing touch sensitivity in terms of the ability to discriminate the two-point threshold – i.e., to be able to detect whether the skin is being touched by one or two points.