Objectifying the Phenomenal in Experimental Psychology: Titchener and Beyond

Abstract

This paper examines Titchener’s notion of stimulus error in the experimental study of mental experience. It places Titchener’s introspective methods into the intellectual world of early experimental psychology. It follows the subsequent development of perceptual experimentation primarily in the American literature, with notice to British and German studies as needed. Subsequent investigators transformed the notion of a specifically stimulus error into experimental questions in which subjects’ attitudes toward their perceptual tasks became independent variables to be manipulated experimentally. Ultimately, these manipulations supported a distinction between accessing phenomenal as opposed to cognitive aspects of subjects’ responses to stimulus objects.