page_title: Wilhelm Wundt
section_title: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology
hierarchical_section_title: Wilhelm Wundt / Biography / Laboratory of Experimental Psychology
caption_attribution_description: English: Wundt research group, ca. 1880. Author unknown. Source: http://psy.uniklinikum-leipzig.de/eng/geschi-e.htm This image is in the public domain. Neither the author of the photograph nor the author's agents or heirs have, to the best of my knowledge, ever claimed authorship or copyright.
context_page_description: Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founders of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines. He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien, set up to publish the Institute's research.
  A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked Wundt's reputation as first for "all-time eminence" based on ratings provided by 29 American historians of psychology. William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third.
context_section_description: In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt opened the first laboratory ever to be exclusively devoted to psychological studies, and this event marked the official birth of psychology as an independent field of study. The new lab was full of graduate students carrying out research on topics assigned by Wundt, and it soon attracted young scholars from all over the world who were eager to learn about the new science that Wundt had developed.
  The University of Leipzig assigned Wundt a lab in 1876 to store equipment he had brought from Zurich. Located in the Konvikt building, many of Wundt's demonstrations took place in this laboratory due to the inconvenience of transporting his equipment between the lab and his classroom. Wundt arranged for the construction of suitable instruments and collected many pieces of equipment such as tachistoscopes, chronoscopes, pendulums, electrical devices, timers, and sensory mapping devices, and was known to assign an instrument to various graduate students with the task of developing uses for future research in experimentation. Between 1885 and 1909, there were 15 assistants.
  In 1879, Wundt began conducting experiments that were not part of his course work, and he claimed that these independent experiments solidified his lab's legitimacy as a formal laboratory of psychology, though the University did not officially recognize the building as part of the campus until 1883. The laboratory grew and encompassing a total of eleven rooms, the Psychological Institute, as it became known, eventually moved to a new building that Wundt had designed specifically for psychological research.
caption: Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind
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