psych

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) is generally considered the father of experimental psychology.

In 1875, at Leipzig University, he set up the first laboratory dedicated to experimental psychology.

In doing so, he separated psychology from philosophy and biology and became the first person to be called a psychologist.

Wundt’s approach became known as structuralism because he used experimental methods to find the basic building blocks (structures) of thought and investigate how they interacted. To do this, he studied sensation and perception, breaking participants’ observations of objects, images and events down into constituent parts in the same way that an anatomist would study a body trying to find its constituent parts and how they interact.

At first he did this by studying reaction time - systematically changing the stimuli he presented to participants and measuring how long it took them to respond - inferring that the longer it took to respond, the more mental processes must be involved.

Later, he adapted and developed a process called introspection to infer more about the nature of the processes involved.