Experimental psychology

About: Experimental psychology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1663 publications have been published within this topic receiving 78468 citations.

The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory

Abstract: Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter thoughtfully integrates the writings of leading contributors, who present and discuss significant bodies of research relevant to their discipline. Volume 62 includes chapters on such varied topics as automatic logic and effortful beliefs, complex learning and development, bias detection and heuristics thinking, perceiving scale in real and virtual environments, using multidimensional encoding and retrieval contexts to enhance our understanding of source memory, causes and consequences of forgetting in thinking and remembering and people as contexts in conversation. * Volume 62 of the highly regarded Psychology of Learning and Motivation series* An essential reference for researchers and academics in cognitive science* Relevant to both applied concerns and basic research

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory

Abstract: People are often overconfident in evaluating the correctness of their knowledge. The present studies investigated the possibility that assessment of confidence is biased by attempts to justify one's chosen answer. These attempts include selectively focusing on evidence supporting the chosen answer and disregarding evidence contradicting it. Experiment 1 presented subjects with two-alternative questions and required them to list reasons for and against each of the alternatives prior to choosing an answer and assessing the probability of its being correct. This procedure produced a marked improvement in the appropriateness of confidence judgments. Experiment 2 simplified the manipulation by asking subjects first to choose an answer and then to list (a) one reason supporting that choice, (b) one reason contradicting it, or (c) one reason supporting and one reason contradicting. Only the listing of contradicting reasons improved the appropriateness of confidence. Correlational analyses of the data of Experiment 1 strongly suggested that the confidence depends on the amount and strength of the evidence supporting the answer chosen.

Memory; A Contribution to Experimental Psychology

Abstract: The first scientific text on the psychology of memory. Relating retention to repetition, describing the shape of the forgetting curve, and measuring strength of association, Hermann Ebbinghaus extended the province of systematic, experimental research to the higher mental processes.

The two disciplines of scientific psychology.

Abstract: NO man can be acquainted with all of psychology today, as our convention program proves. The scene resembles that of a circus, but a circus grander and more bustling than any Barnum ever envisioned—a veritable week-long diet of excitement and pink lemonade. Three days of smartly paced performance are required just to display the new tricks the animal trainers have taught their charges. We admire the agile paperreaders swinging high above us in the theoretical blue, saved from disaster by only a few gossamer threads of fact, and we gasp as one symposiast thrusts his head bravely between another's sharp toothed jaws. This 18-ring display of energies and talents gives plentiful evidence that psychology is going places. But whither? In the simpler days of psychology, the presidential address provided a summing-up and a statement of destination. The President called the roll of the branches of psychology—praising the growth of some youngsters, tut-tutting patriarchally over the delinquent tendencies of others—and showed each to his proper place at the family table. My own title is reminiscent of those grand surveys, but the last speaker who could securely bring the whole of psychology within one perspective was Dashiell, with his 1938 address on \"Rapprochements in Contemporary Psychology\" (15). My scope must be far more restricted. I shall discuss the past and future place within psychology of two historic streams of method, thought, and affiliation which run through the last century of our science. One stream is experimental psychology; the other, correlational psychology. Dashiell optimistically forecast a confluence of these two streams, but that confluence is still in the making. Psychology continues to this day to be limited by the dedication of its investigators to one or the other method of inquiry rather than to scientific psychology as a whole.