Wurzburg School: what it is, origin and contributions to Psychology

A summary of the research and theoretical proposals of the Wurzburg School.

One of the most important schools of Psychology in the history of this science is the Wurzburg School.

In this article we will make a historical review to learn more about how this meeting place of important psychologists came about and what were their most important contributions to the advancement of the discipline.

What is the Wurzburg School?

Throughout the history of psychology there have been different movements that have driven the development of different currents and methodologies, enriching this young science. One of the most famous is the Würzburg School, so called because it was born at the University of Würzburg, in Germany. It covers the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

The one who could be considered as the founder of the Wurzburg the founder of the Würzburg School would be Oswald Külpe, who was a student of Wilhelm Wundt himself, the father of experimental psychology.the father of experimental psychology, as he created what was the first laboratory for the study of this discipline. Külpe continued Wundt's work and shaped the experimental methodology, crystallizing what would eventually become the Würzburg School.

However, although Külpe and Wundt began by sharing a line of thought and the use of experimental methodology, they would eventually drift apart, as Oswald Külpe began to differ on several issues with respect to his mentor. For example, he was not convinced by the concept of psychic causality, nor by the separation that Wilhelm Wundt established between psychic phenomena of a higher type and those of a lower type.

Finally, he also disagreed with some assessments of mental content, since Külpe argued that they need not always be representational and conscious. Külpe argued that they do not necessarily always have to be representational and conscious, since part of his work is devoted to trying to show that these contents often do not fulfill these characteristics.The latter, since part of his work is devoted to trying to show that many times such contents do not meet these characteristics.

All these discrepancies made Külpe finally separate his line of work from that of his former teacher, laying the foundations for the creation of the Wurzburg School, which was gradually joined by different researchers, enriching with their ideas and their work this new place of psychological knowledge.

Theoretical and experimental proposals.

These are the main contributions of the Wurzburg School to the world of early research in psychology.

Introspection

In contrast to Wundt, who we have already seen that he advocated the study of higher processes, Külpe and the Wurzburg school opted to study of thought by means of experimental introspection.. For this reason, a large part of the methodology of this school relies on self-reports, extensive questionnaires in which the subjects who participate in the studies have to record the thoughts they have had throughout the test carried out.

These self-reports have to be applied after the task, so that the subject has time to reflect in depth about it and thus gather and capture a wealth of information that will be of great use to researchers.

Wundt, on the contrary, collected the information during the performance of the task, so that he did not give time for this later reflection, which is key for a correct processing by the volunteers. This is the key to the beginning of what would become the introspective method.

Thinking without images

The Wurzburg School also saw the saw the birth of other interesting concepts, such as that of thinking without images.. Külpe claimed that there should be an objective thought, independent of the images themselves, i.e., a person could recognize a stimulus without necessarily evoking the image of that element. To begin to test this theory, he experimented with a group of volunteers, proposing them to visualize a series of colors while they were in total darkness.

Külpe had many philosophical influences in his training, and that pushed him to continue studying the theory of thought without images, for he was certain that certain elements of thought, the most basic mental processes, do not involve any images.The Wurzburg School used the introspective method, contrary to Wundt, who affirmed that thought could not exist without images. To demonstrate its thesis, the Wurzburg School used the introspective method that we have seen before.

Abstraction

Continuing with the line of new concepts studied in the Wurzburg School, we come to abstraction, another of the valuable contributions of this group of authors. It is a phenomenon of thought by which an individual focuses his or her attention on specific elements, in such a way that they are ignored.The most famous of these experiments was that of the abstraction of the mind, which is the result of the abstraction of the mind, as if it did not exist.

One of the most famous experiments used by Oswald Külpe to demonstrate the existence of the abstraction process was to make a series of subjects visualize different stimuli, including letters, numbers, figures and colors, but asking them to focus on only one of them (the one proposed by the researcher in each test). On each trial, participants could remember the details of the proposed stimuli, but not the rest, so they were effectively abstracting from them.

In addition, if the range of stimuli to be observed was if the range of stimuli to be observed was extended, the awareness of each specific stimulus progressively decreased, which allowed him to conclude that the energy of the participants was not being abstracted.This allowed him to conclude that the energy that we can devote to the attentional process has a limit, and the more elements that are involved, the less performance we will have towards each one of them individually, since attention is being divided among all of them.

Thinking vs. thinking

Another of the distinctions made in the Wurzburg School is between the act of thinking and the thoughts themselves, so that on the one hand we have mental processes, which would be functions or acts, and on the other hand would be thoughts, which would be the contents, associated, yes, with mental images.

For Külpe, thought processes are not susceptible to conscious analysis, and are highly unstable.and, moreover, they are highly unstable. The only way to know them, therefore, is once the event that has triggered them has passed, through the subject's introspection, by means of the self-reports that we have already mentioned above. On the opposite side would be thoughts, which are stable and describable.

Mental sets

Further experiments conducted at the Wurzburg School allowed the authors to continue to reach interesting conclusions within the study of human thought. In this case, they discovered that, in contrast to the theories of associationism, what the subjects actually used in their thoughts was not the same thing as what they thought they used in their thoughts, what the subjects actually used to relate concepts were mental sets..

To do this, they asked participants to think of a category that could relate them when shown a series of concepts, and they always tended to group them under a higher category, rather than associating them with an equivalent concept. For example, when shown a bird, they were more likely to use the category of animal rather than say a particular species of bird.

Criticism

Wundt, Külpe's former teacher, was one of the authors most critical of some of the contributions of the Wurzburg School. For example, with regard to the introspective process, Wundt claimed that it was really complicated for the subject to be able to carry out the thought processes required for the task and at the same time reflect on these processes in order to capture them in the self-report, since both exercises require full attention on the part of the individual. For this reason concludes that these investigations that give rise to the concepts of thought without images should not be considered valid..

In addition, another important author, Titchener, also a follower of Wundt, joins him in this conclusion, since he agrees with his criticism and considers that it is not possible to speak of thinking without images in such cases.

Another important criticism that Wilhelm Wundt makes of the Wurzburg School has to do with the methodology used.Wundt asserts that in the experiments carried out in that school, no measures are being taken to ensure proper experimental control. There was no way to replicate the experiments, since the processes were unique for each subject and each specific trial, which did not allow for repetition, which greatly limits the scope of his conclusions.

Wundt explains that in the experimental process proposed by the Wurzburg School, the observer, instead of being the research psychologist, is the subject of the experiment himself, who is also affected by a task he does not expect (he does not know what he is going to be asked about), which is already biasing the observation of thought processes.

Summary

Although the Wurzburg School received some criticism from Wundt and other authors more in favor of other experimental currents, it is undeniable that this institution carried out important studies that contributed to the development of the Wurzburg School. this institution carried out important studies that contributed to the advancement and growth of psychology, promoting the progressive growth of psychology.It is undeniable that this institution carried out important studies that contributed to the advancement and growth of psychology, promoting the progressive growth of this science and laying the foundations for new currents that arrived in the years to come.

Bibliographical references:

• Lindenfeld, D. (1978). Oswald Külpe and the Würzburg school. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.
• Ogden, R.M. (1951). Oswald Külpe and the Würzburg school. The American Journal of Psychology.
• Roca, D.S., Sáiz, M. (1993). O. Kulpe and the Würzburg school. History of Psychology: texts and commentaries.