In a general sense, experimental psychology is called the one that uses observation and experimentation to extract the laws of mental processes and behavior. To the extent that the use of the experimental method guarantees scientific practice, the most scientific part of psychology is precisely identified with experimental psychology.
Experimental psychology has developed fundamentally within three approaches: the mentalist in Wundt's psychology, the behaviorist (who came to consider psychology as part of natural science) and the cognitive. The topics most discussed and in which this discipline is most successful refer to the cognitive dimension of the psyche (sensation, perception, attention, memory, thought, language) and learning.
Experimental science, for example, considers that the phenomena of consciousness can be studied in the style of experimental science, that is, like any other area of reality, it can be analyzed in terms of cause and effect relationships that allow observing a predictable relationship in certain events marked by a causal chain.
That is, the experimental method is praised for being synonymous with accuracy and precision, as the mathematical field shows. Especially praised by those who elevate the value of rationality to the highest power. From another point of view, philosophy shows that there are areas of the human that cannot be analyzed from the perspective of the exact.
For example, feelings are unquantifiable. Experimental psychology takes as its object of study, among other topics: sensation and perception, memory as a form of knowledge, learning process, human motivation, feelings and emotions, emotion of the internal world and social relationships. Experimental psychology becomes an important tool to better know the human being.
This method starts from the observation of reality in the purest scientific style that starts from the analysis of the facts with which it is possible to establish a hypothesis. The fundamental goal of experimental psychology is to understand human behavior. To achieve this goal, experiments are carried out with people, but mainly with animals.
Psychology can also be classified by the methodological term used, in that case, experimental science simulates the process of exact science to define the patterns of human behavior. Experimental science, as in science itself, uses observation to extract general laws that explain mental processes and human behaviors.
It is common to point to W. Wundt as the founder of this approach when creating the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1876. The expression "experimental psychology" is also used to designate a part of W. Wundt's psychology: he considered the simpler mental states such as perception, sensation, acts of feeling and acts of the will, and could be studied with the experimental methods that until then were used only in physiology; controlled introspection with physiological records and experiment, he thought, would allow the creation of a psychology that he called experimental or individual.
