Experimental psychology: its 5 orientations and objectives

From psychology, the scientific study of how we perceive, learn, feel, etc. is proposed. Experimental psychology studies these processes from the experimental method, which includes the observation, registration and manipulation of variables.

There are three types of variables: independent variables, which are those manipulated by the experimenter; dependent variables, those that are registered and strange or intervening variables, which may appear in the process under study. In this article we will talk about the different perspectives what's inside experimental psychology.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

Currents within experimental psychology

Historically, the most important perspectives within the realm of psychology are as follows.

1. Structuralism

Structuralism, whose representative was Wilhelm Wundt, was the first current of scientific psychology in relation to perceptual processes. For them, perception is determined by the brain structures that the subject possesses.

These structures are not innately given, but are generated through a perceptual learning process.

Structuralism has an empiricist component, in such a way that perception is studied with great interest in sensation as a unit of analysis. This analysis led to the development and study of thresholds, leading to the psychophysical. Thus, perception depends on stimulation and sensation is the result of a complex learning process.

2. Gestalt

At the beginning of the 20th century a psychological current appears, the Gestalt theory. According to this, the whole is much more than the simple union of the parts.

In Gestalt, the conscious experience of the observer is used, also called "phenomenological description", in which, unlike the structuralism, the subject is not required to discriminate between perceptions, but rather to describe in the most objective way possible the data of the scene perceptual.

Gestalt psychologists gave special importance to the perception of emergent properties, which come to be the product that emerged as a result of the relationship between the different components of the perceptual scene. For them, the organization and the relationships between the components were carried out in an orderly manner, generating a series of laws. Furthermore, the principles that constitute our perception were not the fruit of what the subject perceptually, but the result of the interaction of innate brain structures with the environment environment.

• Related article: "Gestalt theory: fundamental laws and principles"

3. Behaviorism

This current was born in the first quarter of the 20th century. This focused so much on the study of behavior that his research focused on it more than on behavior. perceptual experience, which was very simple in order to enhance the explanatory capacity in its experiments.

Thus, from the works of Pavlov, behavioral researchers such as Whatson or B. F. Skinner they brought experimental psychology to an exceptional degree of development.

• Related article: "Behaviorism: history, concepts and main authors"

4. Cognitive psychology

Entering the second half of the twentieth century, cognitive psychology comes out, which, unlike behaviorism, is focuses on the study of the processes that transform the input of information into the subject's response. These processes are called cognitive and refer to the processing of perceptual information from the same perceptual experience, also influenced by the subject's previous experience and its characteristics subjective.

Cognitive psychologists use the "computer metaphor", where they use the term "input" to refer to the input of information and "output" to refer to behavior. To explain the functioning of cognitive processes, they considered it as a series of elements that present a certain structure and a series of interactions. The way to represent this structure and the interaction of components is called "flow diagrams".

Research in cognitive psychology showed that the processing of perceptual information tended to decompose of the same, as well as that the processes related to its processing can be carried out in a serial, parallel, automatic (non-conscious) or controlled way.

5. Computationalism

Computationalism, whose representative was David Marr, arose from a radicalization of the computer metaphor. For them, the computer is another processing system that, like the human mind, processes information, which generated cognitive science, which is a multidisciplinary orientation that studies cognitive processes, starting with the perceptual.

There are three different levels of analysis: the "computational" level, aims to answer the question about the what, that is, the objective of the system to be studied, indicating the objective and the purpose of the system. The "algorithmic" level tries to explain how operations are carried out that allow the system to achieve its objectives, and the "implementation" level, which is concerned with the physical implementation of the system.