Wundt also emphasized the importance of replications, where the phenomenon in experiments would be tested under different conditions. Although Wundt's methods are similar to today's methods in cognitive research, he wrote that introspection could not investigate higher level mental processes such as thinking, language, and critical thinking. On a final note about Wundt and his colleagues, they subscribed to the school of structuralism, which was based on the belief that the goal of psychology is to analyze consciousness into basic elements and investigate how these elements relate. The end goal of structuralists was to identify and examine the fundamental components of living, like sensations, feelings and images--in a way, an early study of cognition. * Ebbinghaus/Calkins Hermann Ebbinghaus was another German psychologist that was around at the time of Wundt, but he decided not to subscribe to Wundt's philosophy of introspection. He devised his own methods for studying human memory where he devised over 2000 nonsense syllables and tested his own ability to learn these stimuli. He devised these nonsense syllables in order to prevent past experience/knowledge from interfering with the subjects' performance levels. Ebbinghaus also examined the factors that might influence performance like the time delay between the lists of presentations. Meanwhile in America, Mary Whiten Calkins, who was also the first woman to be president of The American Psychological Association, was also conducting similar experiments in memory research. Calkins also reported a phenomenon now known as the recency effect, which referred to recalling items in memory. These two and others made a bigger impact on cognitive psychology then Wundt did with his introspective techniques. For example, Ebbinghaus's use of nonsense syllables encouraged other research psychologists to use meaningless material to study how memory works. Also, unli...
