Early experimental psychology

This chapter examines four founding figures of experimental psychology: E. H. Weber; G. T. Fechner; H. von Helmholtz; and W. Wundt. Weber’s experiments led him to postulate an active subjective contribution to the formation of “sense-perceptions, " a notion that would prove fundamental to Helmholtz and Wundt’s work some decades later. Fechner defines psychophysics as the “exact theory of the functionally dependent relations of body and soul, or, more generally, of the material and the mental, of the physical and the psychological worlds.” Helmholtz was a giant of nineteenth-century physics and physiology. His work in physiological optics and acoustics led him across the border, as he put it, into the realm of psychology. For Wundt, experimental psychology just meant physiological psychology. But unlike Weber, Fechner, or Helmholtz, Wundt for the first time sees psychology as an independent discipline, with physiology as its methodological basis, rather than as a subdiscipline of the physiology of sensation.