Experimental Psychology: Its 5 Orientations And Objectives
Psychology proposes the scientific study of how we perceive, learn, feel, etc. Experimental psychology studies these processes based on the experimental method, which includes observation, recording and manipulation of variables.
There are three types of variables: independent variables, which are those manipulated by the experimenter; dependent variables, those that are registered and foreign or intervening variables, which may appear in the process being studied. In this article we will talk about the different perspectives What’s inside experimental psychology?.
Historically, the most important perspectives within the field of psychology are the following.
1. Structuralism
Structuralism, whose representative was Wilhelm Wundt, was the first current of scientific psychology in relation to perceptual processes. For them, perception is determined by the brain structures that the subject possesses. These structures are not innately given but are generated through a perceptual learning process.
Structuralism has an empiricist component, such that perception is studied with great interest in sensation as a unit of analysis. This analysis led to the development and study of thresholds, giving rise to psychophysics. Thus, perception depends on stimulation and sensation is the result of a complex learning process.
2. Gestalt
At the beginning of the 20th century a psychological current appears, the Gestalt theory. According to this, the whole is much more than the simple union of the parts.
In Gestalt, the conscious experience of the observer is used, also called “phenomenological description”, in which, unlike structuralism, the subject is not required to discriminate between perceptions, but rather to describe the data in the most objective way possible. of the perceptual scene.
Gestalt psychologists They gave special importance to the perception of emergent properties, which are the product that emerged as a result of the relationship between the different components of the perceptual scene. For them, the organization and relationships between the components were carried out in an orderly manner, generating a series of laws. Furthermore, the principles that constitute our perception were not the result of what the subject had learned perceptually, but rather the result of the interaction of the innate brain structures with the environment.
3. Behaviorism
This current was born in the first quarter of the 20th century. This focused so much on the study of behavior that their research focused on it more than on the perceptual experience, which was very simple with the aim of enhancing the explanatory capacity in their experiments.
Thus, starting from the work of Pavlov, behaviorist researchers such as Whatson or BF Skinner took experimental psychology to an exceptional degree of development.
4. Cognitive psychology
Entering the second half of the 20th century, cognitive psychology emerged, which, unlike behaviorism, focuses on the study of the processes that transform the input of information into the subject’s response. These processes are called cognitive and refer to the processing of perceptual information from the same perceptual experience, also influenced by the subject’s previous experience and its subjective characteristics.
Cognitive psychologists use the “computer metaphor”, where they use the term “input” to refer to the input of information and “output” to refer to behavior. To explain the functioning of cognitive processes, they considered it as a series of elements that present a certain structure and a series of interactions. The way to represent this structure and the interaction of components is called “flow diagrams”.
Cognitive psychology research showed that the processing of perceptual information tended to decompose of it, as well as that the processes related to its processing can be carried out in a serial, parallel, automatic (non-conscious) or controlled manner.
5. Computationalism
Computationalism, whose representative was David Marr, emerged from a radicalization of the computer metaphor. For them, the computer is another processing system that, like the human mind, processes information, which generated cognitive science, which is a multidisciplinary orientation that studies cognitive processes, starting with perceptual processes.
There are three different levels of analysis: the “computational” level aims to answer the question about what, that is, the objective of the system to be studied, indicating the objective and purpose of the system. The “algorithmic” level attempts to explain how operations are carried out that allow the system to achieve its objectives, and the “implementation” level, which is interested in the physical implementation of the system.
