Serge Nicolas

L'Année Psychologique: History of the founding of a 100-year-old French journal.

The authors present the history of the founding of the French journal LAnnee Psychologique. The names of Theodule Ribot (1839-1916), Henry Beaunis (1830-1921), and Alfred Binet (1857-1911) are closely associated with the journal. Ribots election to the chair of Experimental and Comparative Psychology at the College de France in 1888 marked the official emancipation of psychology in France. Because there was no laboratory associated with the chair, Beaunis, a physiological psychologist from Nancy, proposed to Ribot the creation of the first French laboratory of experimental psychology (1889). Under Beauniss direction, this laboratory was established at the Sorbonne in Paris but was in fact dependent on another educational institution, LEcole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1893 the laboratorys research was first published in a yearly journal named Travaux du Laboratoire de Psychologie Physiologique (2 volumes: 1893-1894). Binet, who joined the laboratory in 1891, was not satisfied by the form of this publication. With Beauniss agreement, he then created LAnnee Psychologique in 1894 to develop the reputation of the laboratorys research. The authors present the evolution and vicissitudes of the journal from 1895 to 1912, with a glance up to the present.

Alfred Binet and higher education.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred Binet sought teaching positions at the Collége de France and the Sorbonne. Binet wanted to develop experimental psychology in France, but the strong psychopathological orientation of French psychology blocked his ambition. The 1st part of this article relates the history of the introduction of psychology, via Théodule Ribot, to the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Ribots premature retirement from the Collège de France in 1901 triggered a battle that led to Binets repeated failure to gain access to these institutions of highter education and the success in 1902 of Ribots students: Pierre Janet at the Collège de France and George Dumas at the Sorbonne.

Implicit memory, explicit memory and the picture bizarreness effect

The experiments reported here were designed to explore the bizarreness effect in implicit and explicit memory by using simple line drawings of common objects (normal vs. bizarre). Each drawing was presented alone under mixed-list encoding conditions. Results showed that performance on explicit conceptual memory tests (cued recall in Experiments 1 and 2) was higher when material was studied in a bizarre format. No such effect was found with implicit conceptual tests (free association in Experiment 1 and category association in Experiment 2). Experiment 3 showed no effect of bizarreness with word-fragments as perceptual implicit or explicit test cues. These dissociative results have important theoretical implications for the comprehension of memory processes.

The picture-superiority effect in category-association tests

In two experiments we examined the picture-superiority effect in the framework of the transfer-appropriate processing approach recently advocated by Roediger, Weldon, and Challis (1989). For the first time conceptual implicit-memory task is used, i.e., category association. In Experiment 1, subjects study a mixed list of pictures and words and then receive either a category-association test or a category-cued recall test, followed by a recognition test. The results show that performance on category-cued recall, recognition, and category-association tests are better when the material is studied in picture format. In Experiment 2, we show that producing a sentence with the material studied (picture or word) eliminates the picture-superiority effect in the implicit test, but does not eliminate picture superiority in the category-cued recall test. These results suggest that conceptually driven processing plays a critical role in category association and explicit tests of memory. The results are discussed in the framework of the transfer-appropriate processing approach to memory.

The Psychophysics of J-R-L Delboeuf (1831–1896)

Delboeufs writings on psychophysics are little known nowadays. The object of this paper is to describe the psychological contributions of this eminent Belgian psychologist of the second half of the 19th century. A true pioneer of experimental psychology, his work on psychophysics began in 1865 at the University of Gand (Ghent) but was not published until 1873 and following years. His work in this area is characterised on the one hand by the adoption of a logarithmic law relating sensation strength to stimulus strength, but which differed from that of Fechner; and on the other hand by the utilisation of a psychophysical technique based on brightness contrast (now called the ‘bisection method’). Even though Delboeuf was classified by Fechner in his later writings as an opponent of his beliefs, Delboeuf was nevertheless one of his least-virulent critics and the only psychologist of that era to have adopted a logarithmic law. Delboeufs work is not only of historic interest; his original ideas possess sufficient interest for present-day psychophysicists to reexamine them.

Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig in 1891.

This article describes Wundts laboratory at Leipzig in 1891 as viewed by a Belgian psychologist, J.J. Van Biervliet (1859-1945). Although few French-speaking psychologists worked in Wundts laboratory, several of those who did reports wrote on how students were trained there. Van Biervliet decided to visit Wundts laboratory at Leipzig in order to strengthen the foundation of his own laboratory at the University of Ghent and to become familiar with Wundts experimental techniques. A translation of J.J. Van Biervliets (1892) article Experimental Psychology. Wundts Institute at Leipzig is presented here as one of the first and most complete articles in French describing the functioning of Wundts laboratory.

The project of an International Congress of Psychology by J. Ochorowicz (1881)

Since the second part of the 19th century, there has been a great increase in the number of international scientific congresses, and they appear a necessary step in the maturation of knowledge. The first person to explicitly suggest the necessity of an international congress of psychology was Julian Ochorowicz (1850–1917), who was considered the founder of Polish psychology. In 1881 he sent an article to Theodule Ribot, editor of Revue Philosophique de la France et de lEtranger, entitled “Project of an International Congress of Psychology,” which was published in Ribots journal. In it he described the dispersed state of psychology in 1881 and the previous 50 years, including 12 subdisciplines ranging from psychophysics to the psychology of art, and how it should aim for unification. He suggested collective efforts to progress rapidly, with widespread collaboration and the continuous exchange of observations, information, and experiments. Having international congresses would constitute a forum for such ...

Study of cases of anterograde amnesia in a disease of mental disintegration

Pierre Janet, in his famous paper (1892) on anterograde amnesia, is concerned with the theme of the disintegration of the human personality. He shows that the weakened personality may lose the power to assimilate memories of current events. After a severe shock, there may supervene not only a retrograde amnesia (a blotting out from memory of some period before the accident), but also a continued or anterograde amnesia, that is to say, an inability to remember events occurring after the accident. Janet details the circumstances of a very interesting case of amnesia resulting from an attack of hysteria, brought on by the shock of bad news. The patient, Mrs. D., had wholly lost all memory of events that occurred during the month and a half before her attack, and since that time she had only been able to remember for a few moments what was going on around her. Janet shows that memories which appear not to be formed are in fact formed; that they exist somewhere in the patients mind with the full vividness of ordinary recollections, and that they may spontaneously crop up in dreams, or may be called out by hypnotic suggestion, or by other methods.