Mid-Term VIP List

Wilhem Wundt

  • father of psychology, formed first psych lab (Germany 1879), started structuralism

E.B. Titchener

  • helped start structuralism, worked with Wundt

William James

  • produced first psych book, influenced by Darwin, started functionalism

Sigmund Freud

  • started psychoanalysis, focused on subconscious and personality

Ivan Pavlov

  • studied dog's saliva, formed concept of classical conditioning, behaviorism

John Watson

  • "Little Albert", classical conditioning, behaviorism

B. F. Skinner

  • formed concept of operant conditioning, skinner box, behaviorism

Abraham Maslow

  • created hierarchy of human needs, humanism

Carl Rodgers

  • humanism, people strive for their needs and wants, ideal self-image and worth

G. Stanley Hall

  • lead founding of APA and becomes its first president, creates first psych lab in America at John-Watkins University

Mary Calkins

  • first women APA president, studied dreams and self (psychoanalysis)

Margaret Floy Washburn

  • first female to be awarded a PhD in psychology; 2nd women president of the APA (1921)

Kenneth Clark

  • first African American APA president, worked on Brown vs BOE

Jean Piaget

  • made study for cognitive development in children, first to make theory on child development

Charles Darwin

  • evolution and natural selection, studies became basics of functionalism

Franz Hall

  • was a German physician from the early 1800's, he was the first person to introduce the idea of phrenology (study of bumps on the skull).

Sir Charles Sherrington

  • first inferred the existence of synapses

Phineas Gage

  • railroad worker who survived a severe brain injury that dramatically changed his personality and behavior; case played a role in the development of the understanding of the localization of brain function

James Olds, Peter Milner

  • carried out research on rats to see what would happen if their pleasure centers were stimulated

Wilder Penfield

  • stimulated brain with electrical probes while patients underwent surgery for epilepsy, created maps of sensory and motor cortices

Paul Broca

  • discovered area in the brain (named for him) in the left frontal lobe responsible for language production

Roger Sperry

  • studied split brain patients; showed that left/right hemispheres have different functions, won Nobel Peace Prize

Carl Wernicke

  • discovered a brain area responsible for interpreting meaning of language

Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga

  • researchers who worked with split brain patients to examine hemisphere specialization

Anton Mesmer

  • an Austrian physician who is credited with hypnosis's modern popularity, he mistakenly thought he discovered an "animal magnetism"

Ernest Hilgard

  • studies showing that a hypnotic trance includes a "hidden observer" suggesting that there is some subconscious control during hypnosis

David Hubel, Torsten Wiesel

  • discovered feature detector groups of neurons in the visual cortex that respond to different types of visual images

Eleanor Gibson, Richard Walk

  • the "visual cliff" experiment, showed that depth perception cues are innate

John Garcia

  • researched taste aversion, showed that when rats ate a novel substance before being nauseated by a drug or radiation, they developed a conditioned taste aversion for the substance

Albert Bandura

  • researcher famous for work in observational or social learning including the famous Bobo doll experiment

Edward C. Tolman

  • behavioral psychologist who identified proposed cognitive maps and latent learning, studied rats in a maze

Herman Ebbinhaus

  • pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect, he was also the first person to describe the learning curve

Elizabeth Loftus

  • cognition and memory; studied repressed memories and false memories; showed how easily memories could be changed and falsely created by techniques such as leading questions and illustrating the inaccuracy in eyewitness testimony

Karl Lashley

  • found that memory is not stored in just one place of the brain, tested on rats

Wolfgang Kohler

  • gestalt psychologist that first demonstrated insight through his chimpanzee experiments, he noticed the solution process wasn't slow, but sudden and reflective

Noam Chomsky

  • theorist who believed that humans have an inborn or "native" propensity to develop language

Benjamin Whorf

  • language; his hypothesis is that language determines the way we think (linguistic determinism)

Eric Lenneberg

  • supported Chomsky; advanced the hypothesis of the critical period for language development

Daniel Schater

  • seven sins of memory

Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman        

  • argue that peoples judgements often rely on heuristics rather than on formal methods of analysis/algorithms

Francis Galton

  • differential psychology, interested in link between heredity and intelligence; founder of the eugenics movement (later discovered fingerprints)

Alfred Binet

  • pioneer in intelligence (IQ) tests, designed a test to identify slow learners in need of help-not applicable in the U.S. because it was too culture-bound (French) (tested for mental age)

Lewis Terman

  • professor at Stanford who revised the Binet test for Americans, the test then became the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, he is also known for his longitudinal research on gifted kids

William Stern

  • he invented the concept of an intelligence quotient (IQ)

Charles Spearman

  • creator of "g-factor", or general intelligence, concept

Howard Gardner

  • devised theory of multiple intelligences (logical-mathematic, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, linguistic, musical, interpersonal, naturalistic)

Robert Sternberg

  • intelligence; devised the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence (academic problem-solving, practical, and creative)

L. L. Thurstone

  • seven clusters of primary mental abilities (word fluency, verbal comprehension, spatial ability, perceptual speed, numerical ability, inductive reasoning, and memory)

David Wechsler

  • developer of WAIS and WISC intelligence tests

Daniel Goleman

  • studied and theorized emotional intelligence