Edward B. Titchener

Edward Bradford Titchener ( born January 11, 1867 in Chichester ( England); † August 3, 1927 in Ithaca, New York, United States) was an Anglo- American experimental psychologist.

Life

Titchener studied at the University of Oxford philosophy, classical languages ​​and Physiology, 1890 went to Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, where he received his doctorate in 1892. Then he moved to the United States, where he taught 1892-1927 Psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca. He built there the first American psychological laboratory, and became one of the founding fathers of psychology in the United States.

Services

Titchener was the first of the ' introduced the term structuralism for the research approach of Wundt in contrast to functionalism William James. He further developed this approach by he took over the introspection of the Würzburg school to study mental processes in more detail. He compared the psychological basic elements about the feelings and thoughts with the chemical elements, which also may result from higher units (molecules).

According to him the Titchenersche illusion of visual perception is named: when a circle surrounded by larger circles, he appears to be smaller than an equally large circle surrounded by smaller circles.

Works

• Experimental psychology ( 1901-05, two volumes in four half books )
• A primer of psychology (1903 )
• Lectures on the elementary psychology of feeling and attention (1908 )
• Lectures on the experimental psychology of the thought- processes (1909 )
• A textbook of psychology (1910 )