Studying Higher Mental Processes:

Although Wundt believed that laboratory investigation was necessarily limited to the immediate conscious experience of basic mental processes, he also had a broader aim for his psychology. He wished to examine other mental processes such as learning, thinking, language, and the effects of culture. But he believed that because these processes were so intertwined with an individual's personal history, cultural history, and the social environment, they could not be controlled sufficiently to be examined with precision in the laboratory. Instead, they could be studied only through inductive observational techniques, cross-cultural comparisons, historical analyses, and case studies. These higher mental processes were a lifelong interest of Wundt's, first outlined in detail in his second major book (Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 1863/1907). They fully occupied the last two decades of his life; and during this time, he enhanced his reputation as a prodigious writer by publishing the massive 10-volume Volkerpsychologie (volker translates roughly as a combination of "cultural," "ethnic," "social," and/or "communal"). The books include detailed analyses of lan- guage and culture, and they encompass topics that would today be considered under the headings of psycholinguistics, the psychology of religion and myth, social psychology, forensic psychology, and anthropology. There were three volumes on myth and religion, two on language, two on societies, and one each on culture and history, law, and art (Blumenthal, 1975). Wundt, like other thinkers of his time, believed that an implication of evolutionary theory was that cultures could be arranged on a continuum, from "primitive" (e.g., Australian aboriginal) to "advanced" (German, presumably). By studying the social customs, myths, religions, and languages of cultures differing in their level of sophistication, Wundt thought that an understanding of the evolution of human mental processes could be attained (Farr, 1983). He was especially interested in language. Much of what he wrote about language was ignored at the time, only to be rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s, when psycholinguistics became a key element in the rise of cognitive psychology (Blumenthal, 1975). For example, Wundt distinguished between the idea to be conveyed by a sentence, the actual structure of the sentence itself, and the manner in which the listener took the sentence structure and inferred the speaker's meaning from it. The relationship between the idea to be conveyed and the sentence structure is similar to the distinction later made by linguist Noam Chomsky between the deep and surface structures of a grammar, and Wundt's belief that the listener would not recall the actual sentence but the meaning of it is similar to later research on memory for the "gist" of communicated message

Of the reading above, Post ONEquestion or point of confusion about the topics, theories, or individualsof the reading above you may have.