TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2004//
TI  - Reaction time tests in Leipzig, Paris and Wurzburg. the Franco-German history of a psychological experiment, 1890-1910
JO  - Medizinhistorisches Journal
A1  - Schmidgen, Henning
A1  - Carroy, Jacqueline
SP  - 27
EP  - 55
VL  - 39
IS  - 1
N2  - Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25805361    This article diiscusses from a comparative perspective the complex history of the reaction experiment with the Hipp chronoscope, one of the central experiments of late 19th-century psychology. It focuses on Wilhelm Wundt's (1832-1920) Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig and on the Paris Laboratory for Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne, which was initially directed by Henry Beaunis (1830-1921), but soon came to be dominated by the research activities of Alfred Binet (1857-1911). When the Paris psychologists founded their Laboratory in 1889, they took the Leipzig Institute as their model. In the early 1890s they adopted the reaction time experiment that had been central to Wundt's psychology. Shortly after, they modified this experiment according to their own specific interests. For Binet, it no longer served as a method for identifying the elementary components of "general" consciousness (as in Wundt), but for classifying "individual" personalities. The methodological and technological changes that Binet introduced into the experimental practice of psychology had no immediate impact on the research work in Leipzig. However, they influenced the "Wurzburg School" of psychology under Wundt's former assistant, Oswald Külpe (1862-1915). This illustrates that the comparative history of transfers of "experimental systems" (Rheinberger) across national borders is not simply a history of mere transports. Rather, it is a history of transferences that sometimes includes surprising "re-transferences".    <p>Cited in: Burnham JC (2009). Accident Prone: A history of technology, psychology, and misfits of the machine age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08117-5. The book was favorably reviewed by David Hemenway in <i>Injury Prevention</i> (2011),  doi: 10.1136/ip.2011.031658.<br><br>    Special Thanks to Dr. Burnham for providing an electronic copy of the bibliographic notes that accompany each chapter. This greatly facilitated adding previously unidentified records to the SafetyLit database. SafetyLit users may obtain a listing of the book's references by searching using the following Textword(s) Exact query: "Burnham-Accident-Prone".</p><p />  <p>Language: de</p>
LA  - de
SN  - 0025-8431
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/
ID  - ref1
ER  -