The Importance Of Structuralism

Structuralism- A system of psychology originally advocated by William Wundt, to identify the components of the mind. E.B. Titchener, a student and follower of Wundt, translated material brought from Germany to the United States. While he claimed it was Wundt’s material, his translations were drastically different, misrepresented even, from those ideas originally formed by Wundt. Structuralism to Wundt was organization of consciousness of the mind; furthermore, the mind could voluntarily order and organize mental elements. The term introspection, coined by Wundt, was used as the method of understanding the conscious mind by researchers (K. Cherry, n.d.). In direct opposition, Titchener was more focused on the mechanical linking of elements

One key theme in functionalism is that the brain is much like a computer. It sits neutral until data is input and then produces behaviors accordingly, depending on environmental influences. The concept has three main focuses (Schultz, 2011). The first is to determine how it operates, what it achieves, and by which environmental conditions the mind operates and what it achieves as it does. The second focus states that because there is a conscious, there must be some function behind it. It has to provide some type of service for the being; Functionalists needed to know what the specific mental process was and how it was performing, for example- the ability to judge and an individual willing something to happen. Functional psychology has a third and final major concept- the mind and body relationship. It assumes there is an uninhibited current of information flowing from one to the other and looks for no real discrepancy between the two. Functionalism was very influential in the education system; Frances Galton was one of the first to suggest that children be studied early in life to determine what type of independent education plan they required, according to their aptitudes (Shultz,

The idea is that the focus is on the experience as a whole instead of its individual parts. The Phi Phenomenon says that people perceive motion when there is no motion. Lights that are side by side and blink, one after the other, look as if they are moving, but are actually only blinking quickly in succession; this is an example of the Phi Phenomenon. There are six basic principles of perceptual organization: proximity, continuity, similarity, closure, simplicity, and figure/ground (Schultz, 2011). Gestalt Psychologists believe that when parts, such as puzzle pieces, are combined, the whole (a complete picture) is different than the parts. When you move them all together, you create something different or greater than the sum of the individual pieces. This concept is in direct opposition of the concept of introspection, suggested by Wundt, that believes in