Edward B. Titchener facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Edward B. Titchener
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| Born |
Edward Bradford Titchener
11 January 1867 Chichester, England
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| Died | 3 August 1927 (aged 60) |
| Nationality | English |
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| Known for |
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| Spouse(s) |
Sophie Bedloe Kellogg
(m. 1894) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | Cornell University |
| Doctoral advisor | Wilhelm Wundt |
| Doctoral students |
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Edward Bradford Titchener (born January 11, 1867 – died August 3, 1927) was an English psychologist. He is famous for creating his own type of psychology called structuralism. This idea focused on understanding the basic parts that make up the human mind.
Titchener studied with Wilhelm Wundt, a very important psychologist, for several years. Later, Titchener became a professor at Cornell University in the United States. There, he started the biggest program for psychology students who wanted to earn their PhDs at that time. His first PhD student, Margaret Floy Washburn, was the first woman ever to get a PhD in psychology in 1894.
Contents
About Edward Titchener
His Early Life and Education
Edward Titchener was born in England in 1867. His parents were Alice Field Habin and John Titchener. When he was nine, Edward went to live with his grandparents. His grandfather, who was a successful lawyer, made sure Edward got a good education.
Edward went to The Prebendal School and Malvern College. Then, from 1885 to 1890, he studied at Oxford University. He earned a special degree in classics. While at Oxford, he became interested in biology and started reading the works of Wilhelm Wundt. Titchener even translated one of Wundt's important books, Principles of Physiological Psychology, from German into English.
In 1890, he spent an extra year at Oxford. He worked with a physiologist named John Scott Burdon-Sanderson to learn how to do scientific research. In the autumn of 1890, Titchener moved to Germany to study directly with Wundt. He finished his PhD in 1892, focusing on how we see with both eyes.
Moving to Cornell University
In 1892, Titchener joined Cornell University in the United States. He started as a lecturer teaching both philosophy and psychology. He quickly built a psychology laboratory there. By 1895, he became a full professor. At Cornell, he taught his students his ideas about Wundt's work, which he called structuralism.
His Personal Life
Edward Titchener married Sophie Bedloe Kellogg in 1894. She was a school teacher. They had four children together. Once he had his job at Cornell, Titchener helped support his mother financially for the rest of her life. His mother and sisters had faced tough times after his father passed away.
Titchener's Main Ideas
Titchener's thoughts on how the mind works were greatly shaped by Wilhelm Wundt's ideas. Titchener wanted to break down the mind into its basic parts, much like a chemist breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen. For Titchener, sensations and thoughts were like the "structures" of the mind.
He believed that a sensation had four main features:
- Intensity: How strong it is (like a loud sound).
- Quality: What kind it is (like the color red).
- Duration: How long it lasts.
- Extent: How much space it takes up.
Titchener thought that if we could define and categorize these basic parts of the mind, we could understand how mental processes and higher thinking work. He wanted to know what each part of the mind is, how they work together, and why they interact in certain ways.
Introspection
The main tool Titchener used to find the different parts of consciousness was called introspection. This means looking inward at your own thoughts and feelings.
Titchener had very strict rules for introspection. For example, if a person was shown a pencil, they had to describe its features, like its color or length. But they were not allowed to say "pencil." Why? Because saying "pencil" was naming the object, not describing the raw experience of seeing it. Titchener called this mistake "stimulus error."
He wrote detailed manuals for students on how to do these experiments. He believed that all valid psychology experiments had to involve introspection. He thought that mental things could be measured and studied scientifically, just like physical things.
Most of his experiments were done by two trained researchers working together. One was the "observer" (who did the introspection) and the other was the "experimenter" (who set up the test and wrote down what happened). They would then switch roles. Titchener stressed how important it was for them to work well together and communicate.
Over time, Titchener's method of structuralism slowly faded away. Newer ways of studying the mind became more popular.
Attention
Edward Titchener also came up with seven important rules about attention. One of these was the "law of prior entry." This law says that "the object we are paying attention to comes into our awareness more quickly than things we are not paying attention to."
This idea has been studied a lot. Recent research has shown strong evidence that attention really does make us notice things faster. Studies looking at how quickly we see things we are focusing on suggest that Titchener's law is true. Brain scans have also confirmed that attention can speed up how our brain reacts to what we see.
His Life and Legacy
Titchener was a very engaging and powerful speaker. While his idea of structuralism was popular during his lifetime, it did not continue to thrive after he died. Some people today think that his psychology was too narrow and his methods too strict. Without Titchener himself guiding it, structuralism struggled. However, structuralism and Wundt's ideas still influenced many areas of psychology we study today.
Titchener is known for bringing some of Wundt's structuralism ideas to America, but he made some changes. For example, Wundt focused on how parts of consciousness relate to each other. Titchener, however, focused more on simply finding and naming the basic parts themselves. In his book An Outline of Psychology (1896), Titchener listed over 44,000 basic qualities of conscious experience!
Titchener is also remembered for creating the English word "empathy" in 1909. He used it to translate the German word "Einfühlungsvermögen," which described a new idea about understanding others' feelings.
One of Titchener's students, Edwin Boring, helped make Titchener's work famous. Boring's book, History of Experimental Psychology, was very influential. It described Titchener's contributions in great detail. Titchener supervised 56 students who earned their PhDs, and 21 of them were women.
Another student, Cheves Perky, performed the "Banana Experiment" in 1910. This experiment helped discover the "Perky Effect," which shows a link between what we imagine and what we actually see. Her work is now considered a classic in the study of mental imagery.
Professor Titchener received special honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin. He was a founding member of the American Psychological Association. He also translated other important psychology books and edited several psychology journals. In 1904, he started a group called "The Experimentalists," which is now known as the "Society of Experimental Psychologists."
See also
In Spanish: Edward Titchener para niños
