By: M.R.G.
Important Dates in G. E. Mueller’s Life:
Ø Born in Germany on July 16th, 1850 to August and Rosalie.
Ø Was the third surviving child and second son.
Ø After high school, he completed one year of philosophy studies at each of the Leipzig and Berlin universities before volunteering as a replacement soldier an elite Prussian regiment.
Ø During these studies, he was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Johannes Herbart, which proposed that psychology is a science, grounded in experience, metaphysics, and mathematics.
Ø Upon his return to Leipzig, he spent one further semester with Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch, his first mentor, and then continued his studies with Rudolf Hermann Lotze in Gottingen.
Ø It was with Lotze that Muller learned the importance of physiology for perception and the associationistic qualities of perception.
Ø A year later, in 1873, he completed his dissertation, which is one of E. B. Titcheners sources for the discussion of attention.
Ø After three years spent primarily as a resident teacher, he was able to become a private instructor. In the German-speaking areas, a doctorate was not sufficient to begin a university career, so a second dissertation was necessary.
Ø Completed his second dissertation in 1878. This began his restructuring of psychophysics, but did not complete it until 25 years later.
Ø Became an instructor at the recently founded Bukovinian university in the winter of 1880.
Ø In April of 1881, succeeded Lotze at Gottingen.
Ø Began to experiment in 1879, with weights provided by Fechner, and in 1887 got his first official grant to pay for the first memory drum.
Ø In 1904, he became the chair of the German Society of Experimental Psychology, a title he held until 1927, 5 years after his retirement.
Ø In 1922, he was legally forced to retire and took up color theory in earnest.
Ø In 1930, published 1300 pages on color theory.
Ø Died shortly before Christmas in 1934 at the age of 84.
Mueller’s Work:
Ø Regarded as the methodologist of psychological experimentation.
Ø Had a reputation as an extremely careful (and often extremely critical) supervisor.
Ø He was tested for, it not a recorded subject in, each experiment carried out in his laboratory.
Ø Recognized, by his contemporaries, as the master experimenter and methodologist in three areas of experimental psychology: the study of memory, visual perception (including color vision), and psychophysics.
Ø He found that learning and recall for his subjects involved active processes such as grouping, rhythms, and generally conscious organizational strategies for the verbal tasks.
Ø With Pilzecker, devised the interference theory of forgetting, particularly the concept that new learnings can interfere with old ones. In other words it is called retroactive inhibition.
Ø Considered the three-process color theory was chemical not metabolic, as Hering had proposed.
Ø After Fechner, Mueller’s work in psychophysics stands out as the most significant in the history of experimental psychology.
Ø Even though in today’s textbooks, Mueller’s name is mentioned only very slightly, if at all, his work was still appreciated in the 1950’s.
Summary:
Much of the decline in Mueller’s influence can be attributed to the changes of the subject matter of experimental psychology. It has moved from the emphasis on methodology to the psychological theory.
But it also needs to be noted that very little of Mueller’s work had been written or even translated into English. There are several reasons for this absence of available information. One of them is that Mueller was not that keen on putting his name on some of his papers and reports that he submitted. Second was the fact that at this time World War One had just ended and the German economy was in a terrible disarray and that ballooning inflation kept Mueller from sending his reports to English language journals. With these reasons it is easy to see why much of Mueller’s work has gone unnoticed in the history of psychology. But when the information is finally uncovered, it proves that despite the lack of translated material, Mueller’s work was of the utmost importance to the development of experimental psychology.
Behrens, P. (1997). G. E. Mueller: The third pillar in experimental psychology. In W. G. Bringmann & H. E. Luck & R. Miller & C. E. Early (Eds.), A pictorial history of psychology (pp. 171-176). Chicago: Quintessence Publishing.
Cousins, D. (2001). European traces of the history of psychology. Retrieved March 7th, 2001 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.ric.edu/dcousins/europsych/muller.html
Haupt, E. J. (1996). Biography of George Elias Mueller. Retrieved February 28th, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/psychology/haupt/haupthp.html
* Many of the other sources that I found were in German.