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3000 BCE
Imhotep
He was physician that wrote down the first written record of the brain. -
Period: 1300 BCE to 1600 BCE
St Thomas Aquinas
He was a monk that questioned the beliefs and was interested in science which was forbidden. -
470 BCE
Thales
Thales was one of the first philospher that ideas caused a break between philosphy and religion. He started to question everything, this was different for this time. He was interested in the underlying behavoirs. He was interested in explaining natural phenomena and not gods. -
470 BCE
Parmenides
Parmenides agreed with tradition and natural causes. He did not believe that observation was enough, he thought that you needed to understand it as well. He had an emphasis on thinking, and introspection. -
470 BCE
Democritus
Democritus believed that everything could be subdivided and the smallest atoms and everything comes from both of those. He believed in reductionism, which is if you want to believe in something, but you have to find the driving force. Also something has to be reduced to the smallest element for true understanding. -
470 BCE
Hippocrates
Hippocrates was the first philosopher to bring up the importance of the physical body. He connected physical wellbeing to behavior. His major impact on psychology was the 4 humors. Which are blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. He believed that the mind and body were connected together. -
Period: 470 BCE to 470 BCE
Sophists and Protagoras
These two philosophers believed that everyone sees their world through their own unique lens. They also believed that two people do not experience things the same way. -
Period: 470 BCE to 347 BCE
Plato
Plato was a student of Socrates. He reinforced ideas of subjectivity of reality. -
Period: 470 BCE to 347 BCE
Socrates
Socrates encouraged people to question everything. He was very introspective, he liked to know why he believed what he did. He sentenced to death at the age of 70 because he was distributing the children, because he also encouraged them to question what they believe in. -
Period: 470 BCE to 470 BCE
Pythagores
Pythagores thinking was mainly mathematical. He looked at relationships between phenomena. He also believed in rationalism. Rationalism is the belief that natural phenomena followed a pattern and laws. He believed that everything is connected in someway. -
Period: 384 BCE to 322 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle was a student of Plato. He emphasized Empiricism. He also had theories on memory. Law of continuity, is when tow things happen together they are remembered together. Law on contrast, is when a person remembers one thing, a person also remembers things that are opposite. People remember things that are similar, this is called similarity. People remember things that occur together, this is called frequency. -
May 10, 640
Thales
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Period: to
Willis
Since there was an increase in availble technology, he was able to do careful dissections. He recognized white vs grey matter in the brain and the spinal cord. -
Descrates
He believed in the immaterial "soul (innate consciousness) and physical material sturcture/mind (brain). He was the first to discover the cerebrospinal fluid inside of the brain. He called this animal spirits. -
Willis
First published brain anatomy -
Period: to
Kant
Kant emphasized the role of the active mind in creating the phenomenal world. -
Period: to
Mesmer
Mesmer believed that in animal magnetism. He thought that his hands alone were magnet. -
Period: to
Galvani
He found that the brain is an electrically sensitive organ. -
Period: to
Gall
He found that the hemispheres of the brain are connected by white matter bundles. He found that nerve fibers are crossover from right to left in the spinal cord. He also believed in phrenology. Phrenology is the study of bumps and dents on the skull correspond with over and under developed abilities. -
Period: to
Flourens
He would intentionally damage a segment of his patients brain and see what was damaged. His studies provided first evidence that suggested that the brain worked together as a whole and discredited phrenology. -
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Weber
He created the jnd, also known as just noticeable difference. He acknowledged this a unit of subjective weight discrimination. -
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Bouillaud and Aubertin
They believed that language was localized in the left frontal lobe. -
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Fechner
He started the field of psychophysics. This is the type of psychology that is interested in measurable psychology and physiological variables. -
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Charles Darwin
Darwin studied birds on the Galapago islands. This expedition helped him form his theories on natural selection. Natural selection is the idea that animals adapt and the animals with the more fit traits survive. -
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Broca
He observed his patient "tan". His studies provided physical evidence for localization in the brain. He also found Broca's area. His patient had a loss of speech production. He could only produce one sound. -
Period: to
Wundt
He studied sensation and perception, attention, feelings, emotions, reaction time, and learning. He studied the conscious mind. He believed in immediate experiences. This was the idea that everyone experience experienced the same, and there is no interpretation. The other component of the conscious mind. This is emotional reactions, and ideas. This is higher level input, for example memories. -
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Fritsch and Hitzig
They preformed brain electrical stimulation studies. They studied on dogs. They would stimulate cortex, and wait for a response. They found the primary motor cortex. When they stimulated this area, it caused the dogs body to move. -
Period: to
Ferrier
He preformed electrical stimulation brain studies and found new parts of the brain. He found the primary somatosensory cortex, visual cortex, and primary auditory cortex. -
Period: to
Wernicke
He believed in memories, this is how people remember words and sounds. He thought that memories were localized throughout the cortex. He found the part of the brain associated with speech and language comprehension, now called Wernicke's area. -
Period: to
Pavlov
Pavlov studied classical conditioning by observing dogs. He found that there is a unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response before conditioning. After conditioning there is a conditioned stimulus and conditioned response after many trials of learning. -
Period: to
Ebbinghaus
He did research involving nonsense syllables. Through his research he created a theory on the forgetting curve. He studied how quickly the participants learned, and how long people remembered. People forgot up to seventy nine percent of the new information within thirty days. He found that it is important to rehearse the words or information for improving retention. -
Period: to
Enrenfels
His writings were about our inability to introspectively break down objects as a whole or ideas into separate elements. -
Period: to
Titchener
He believed in structuralism. He believed the key to the conscious mind was to understand the individual elements it was made up of. -
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Franz
He trained cats to escape a "puzzle box". He would preform an ablation on the frontal cortex of a cat. The more damage he did, the more memory impairment the cat experience. But even after the damage he relearned the puzzle. -
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Watson
Watson is the founder of behaviorism. He believed that mot human emotional reactions result from pavlovian type conditioning of neutral stimuli paired with three innate, unconditioned reactions. He thought that certain stimuli elicit certain emotions. He studied little Albert. He conditioned him to fear the rat. This experiment proved his theory. -
Period: to
Wertheimer
He studied optical illusions, apparent movement, and phi phenomenon. He promoted the theory of productive thinking. -
Period: to
Koffka
He is one of the founders of the school of Gestalt Psychology. -
Period: to
Kohler
He is another founder of the school of Gestalt Psychology. He studied chimpanzees to observe their insight learning. He also introduced the idea of psychophysical isomporhism. -
Period: to
Lashley
His theory was equipotentiality. This is the idea that the younger a person is the more likely to relearn what was lost. He believed that any region of the intact brain could adopt the function of a damaged section. This is now called neural plasticity. -
Period: to
Penfield
Theories were based on auras before seizures. He believed that the aura was a sign of the area of the brain where the seizures started. He thought that if he removed this section and cause the seizures to stop. -
Period: to
Mary Cover Jones
She conducted the first study using counterconditioning as a procedure for removing fear. Her subject was little peter. -
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Piaget
His theory was titled genetic epistemology. His theory has four stages: Sensorimotor stage, pre operational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage. Each stage has its own components. -
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Rosalie Rayner
She helped Watson with his Albert Studies. -
Period: to
Skinner
Skinner is a behaviorist invented the operant chamber and studied operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is the idea that we learn to respond to and control our environments through the consequence of our behavior. The operant chambers were carefully controlled environments for the rat. He could manipulate what was or was not happening. -
Period: to
Gibson
He found that depth perception occurs innately or early in development with no prior learning. -
Bruner
He studied perception and how it is influenced by mental processes. -
Milner
She studied a patient given the name H.M. He experienced temporal damage. He could not form new long term memories. He did not have short term memory. He could recall memories from his past. -
Period: to
Miller
He believed that behavioristic views were too limited for studying language. -
Chomsky
He was interested in linguistics, learning the rules of language. He was the first to publicly say that behavoirism and conditioning does not explain how we learn our native language. There is a predisposition to learn language. He thought that mental processes were important for learning language. -
Neisser
He did research on information processing, cognition, intelligence, and memory. He published "Cognitive Psychology". -
Locke
Locke beleived that humans were born with a "tabvia Rasa" (clean state). Our brains are shaped by experience.