post and reflection 2/6

I found a website that offers an experiment/test of serial memory. http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/experiments/memtask.html


This week we discussed Wundt and Ebbinghaus a lot in class. We also performed an experiment of serial memory and associations. I had a very hard time trying to remember the list of words once the list became longer than about six or seven. If I remember right Bill told us that Wundt went well into the 40's with the length of his lists. I can't imagine how long it would have taken me just to remember 20 words.

I do not have a lot of background in the history of psychology and I was very impressed with the work done by Wundt. I thought it was very interesting how his ideas were just disregarded at the time he was presenting them and now so much later we have accepted his ideas and began to further the work he started. Its amazing how people can completely buy into one way of thinking and completely ignore other ideas for so long untill deciding to pursue another view. I wonder how much different the study of psychology and the areas Wundt specialized in would be different today if people would have jumped on his band wagon from day one?