Cyril Burt

Born: 3 March 1883 Westminster, London
Died: 10 October 1971

Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics.
Burt is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data. Some scholars have asserted that Burt did not commit fraud.

Work in educational psychology

In 1908, Burt took up the post of Lecturer in Psychology and Assistant Lecturer in Physiology at Liverpool University, where he was to work under the famed physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington. In 1909 Burt made use of Charles Spearman's model of general intelligence to analyse his data on the performance of schoolchildren in a battery of tests. This first research project was to define Burt's life's work in quantitative intelligence testing, eugenics, and the inheritance of intelligence. One of the conclusions in his 1909 paper was that upper-class children in private preparatory schools did better in the tests than those in the ordinary elementary schools, and that the difference was innate.

In 1913, Burt took the part-time position of a school psychologist for the London County Council (LCC), with the responsibility of picking out the 'feeble-minded' children, in accordance with the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. He notably established that girls were equal to boys in general intelligence. The post also allowed him to work in Spearman's laboratory, and received research assistants from the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, including Winifred Raphael.
Burt was much involved in the initiation of child guidance in Great Britain and his 1925 publication The Young Delinquent led to opening of the London Child Guidance Clinic in Islington in 1927. In 1924 Burt was also appointed part-time professor of educational psychology at the London Day Training College (LDTC), and carried out much of his child guidance work on the premises.

Further reading

Biographies

• Burt, C.L. (1949). An autobiographical sketch. Occupational Psychology, 23, 9-20.
• Valentine, Charles (1965). "Cyril Burt: A Biographical Sketch and Appreciation." In C. Banks, & P.L. Broadhurst, (Eds.), Stephanos: Studies in Psychology Present to Cyril Burt (pp. 11–20). London: University of London.
• Hearnshaw, L.S. (1979). Cyril Burt: Psychologist. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Also published London: Hodder and Stoughton.
• (1983) "Sir Cyril Burt". AEP (Association of Educational Psychologists) Journal, 6 (1) [Special issue].
• Fancher, R.E. (1985) The Intelligence Men: Makers of the I.Q. Controversy. New York: Norton.
• Scarr, S. (1994). "Burt, Cyril L.", in R.J. Sternberg (ed.), Encyclopedia of Intelligence (Vol. 1, pp. 231–234). New York: Macmillan.

Books by Burt

• Burt, C.L. (1917). The Distribution and Relations of Educational Abilities. London: The Campfield Press.
• Burt, C.L. (1921). Mental and Scholastic Tests. London: P. S. King. Republished and revised (4th ed.). London: Staples, (1962).
• Burt, C.L. (1923). Handbook of Tests for Use in Schools. London: P. S. King. Republished (2nd ed.) London: Staples, (1948).
• Burt, C.L. (1925). The Young Delinquent. London: University of London Press. Republished and revised (3rd ed.) London: University of London Press, (1938); (4th ed.) Bickley: University of London Press, (1944).
• Burt, C.L. (1930). The Study of the Mind. London: BBC.
• Burt, C.L. (1934). How the Mind Works. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company. Republished London: Allen & Unwin (1945).
• Burt, C.L. (1935). The Subnormal Mind. London: Oxford University Press. Republished London: Oxford University Press, (1937).
• Burt, C.L. (1937). The Backward Child. London: University of London Press. Republished (5th ed.) London: University of London Press, (1961).
• Burt, C.L. (1940). The Factors of the Mind: An Introduction to Factor Analysis in Psychology. London: University of London Press.
• Burt, C.L. (1946). Intelligence and Fertility. London.
• Burt, C.L. (1957). The Causes and Treatments of Backwardness (4th ed.). London: University of London Press.
• Burt, C.L. (1959). A Psychological Study of Typography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Burt, C.L. (1968). Psychology and Psychical Research: the Seventeenth Frederic W. H. Myers Memorial Lecture, The Society for Psychical Research.
• Burt, C.L. (1975). The Gifted Child. New York: Wiley and London: Hodder and Stoughton
• Burt, C.L. (1975). ESP and Psychology. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Edited by Anita Gregory.

Articles by Burt

• Burt, C.L. (1909). "Experimental Texts of General Intelligence," The British Journal of Psychology, 3, 94–177.
• Burt, C.L. (1915). "Mental Tests," Child Study, 8, 8–13.
• Burt, C.L. (1920). "The Definition and Diagnosis of Mental Deficiency"; "Part II," Studies in Mental Inefficiency, 1, 47–54, 69–77.
• Burt, C.L. (1920). "The Neurotic School Child," Studies in Mental Inefficiency, 4, 7–12.
• Burt, C.L. (1923). "The Causal Factors of Juvenile Crime," British Journal of Medical Psychology, 3, 1–33.
• Burt, C.L. (1923). "Delinquency and Mental Defect", British Journal of Medical Psychology, 3, 168–178.
• Burt, C.L. (1949). "Alternative Methods of Factor Analysis and their Relations to Pearson’s Method of ‘Principal Axes’," British Journal of Psychology, 2, 98–121.
• Burt, C.L. (1951). "General Psychology." In Dingle, Herbert (ed.) A Century of Science, (pp. 272-286). Hutchinson's Scientific And Technical Publications.
• Burt, C.L. (1954). "The Differentiation of Intellectual Ability," The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 24, 76–90.
• Burt, C.L. (1955). "The Evidence for the Concept of Intelligence," British Journal of Educational Psychology, 25, 158–177.
• Burt, C.L. (1958). "Definition and Scientific Method in Psychology", British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 11, 31–69.
• Burt, C.L., & Gregory, W.L. (1958). "Scientific Method in Psychology: II", British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 11, 105–128.
• Burt, C.L. (1958). "The Inheritance of Mental Ability", American Psychologist, 13, 1–15.
• Burt, C.L. (1959). "General Ability and Special Aptitudes", Educational Research, 1, 3–16.
• Burt, C.L. (1959). "The Examination at Eleven Plus", British Journal of Education Studies, 7, 99–117.
• Burt, C.L. (1960). "The Mentally Subnormal", Medical World, 93, 297–300.
• Burt, C.L. (1961). "Factor Analysis and its Neurological Basis", British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 14, 53–71.
• Burt, C.L. (1962). "Francis Galton and his Contributions to Psychology," British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 15, 1–49.
• Burt, C.L., & Williams, E.L. (1962). "The Influence of Motivation on the Results of Intelligence Tests", British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 15, 129–135.
• Burt, C.L. (1963). "Is Intelligence Distributed Normally?", British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 16(2), 175–190.
• Burt, C.L. (1966). "The Genetic Determination of Differences in Intelligence: A Study of Monozygotic Twins Reared Together and Apart," British Journal of Psychology, 57, 137–153.
• Burt, C.L. (1966). "Parapsychology and its Implications," International Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 2, 363-377.
• Burt, C.L. (1968). "An Illustration of Factor Analysis". In Butcher, Harold J. Human Intelligence: Its Nature and Assessment (pp. 66–71). London: Methuen.
• Burt, C.L. (1969). "Intelligence and Heredity: Some Common Misconceptions," Irish Journal of Education, 3, 75–94.
• Burt, C.L. (1971). "Quantitative Genetics in Psychology", British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology, 24, 1–21.
• Burt, C.L. (1972). "Inheritance of General Intelligence", American Psychologist, 27, 175–190.

Readings on the Burt Affair

• Blinkhorn, S.F. (1989). "Was Burt Stitched Up?", Nature, 340:439.
• Blinkhorn, S.F. (1995). "Burt and the Early History of Factor Analysis", in N.J. Mackintosh, Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed?, Oxford University Press.
• Brace, C. Loring (2005). "Sir Cyril Burt: Scientific Fraud", in Race is a Four Lettered Word, the Genesis of the Concept, Oxford University Press.
• Butler, Brian E., & Petrulis, Jennifer (1999). "Some Further Observations Concerning Sir Cyril Burt," British Journal of Psychology, 90, 155–160.
• Cohen, John (1977). "The Detractors", Encounter, 48(3), pp. 86–89.
• Eysenck, H.J. (1977). "The Case of Sir Cyril Burt," Encounter, 48(1), pp. 19–23.
• Fletcher, Ronald (1991). Science, Ideology, and the Media. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction.
• Gould, S.J. (1996). "The Real Error of Cyril Burt Factor Analysis and the Reification of Intelligence," in The Mismeasure of Man, W. W. Norton & Company.
• Hartley, James and Rooum, Donald (1983). "Sir Cyril Burt and Typography: A Re-evaluation", British Journal of Psychology, 74, 203–212.
• Jensen, Arthur R. (1977). "Did Sir Cyril Burt Fake His Research on Heritability of Intelligence?," The Phi Delta Kappan, 58(6), pp. 471, 492.
• Jensen, Arthur R. (1978). "Sir Cyril Burt in Perspective," American Psychologist, Vol. 33(5), 499–503.
• Jensen, Arthur R. (1995). "IQ and Science: The Mysterious Burt Affair". In Mackintosh, Nicholas John (ed.), Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed? (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press), 1–12. ISBN 0-19-852336-X.
• Joynson, R.B. (1989). The Burt Affair. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-01039-X.
• Lamb, Kevin (1992). "Biased Tidings: The Media and the Cyril Burt Controversy", Mankind Quarterly, 33, 203.
• Mackintosh, Nicholas (editor) (1995). Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed?. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-852336-X.
• Osborne, R.T. (1990). "Cyril Burt's Invariant Kinship Correlations," The Mankind Quarterly, 31, 163–170.
• Rowe, D., & Plomin, R. (1978). "The Burt Controversy: The Comparison of Burt's Data on IQ with Data from Other Studies", Behavior Genetics, 8, 81–83.
• Rushton, J.P. (1994). "Victim of Scientific Hoax (Cyril Burt and the Genetic IQ Controversy)" at the Wayback Machine (archived October 13, 2004), Society, 31, 40–44.
• Rushton, J.P. (2002). "New Evidence on Sir Cyril Burt: His 1964 Speech to the Association of Educational Psychologists", Intelligence, 30, 555–567.
• Tizard, Jack (1976). "Progress and Degeneration in the IQ Debate: Comments on Urbach", The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 27: 251–258.
• Tucker, W. H. (1994). "Fact and Fiction in the Discovery of Sir Cyril Burt's Flaws," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 30, 335–347.
• Tucker, W. H. (1997). "Re-reconsidering Burt: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 33(2) 145–162.
• Woolridge, Adrian (1994). Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860-c.1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edward B. Titchener

Born: 11 January 1867 Chichester, England
Died: 3 August 1927 Ithaca, New York
Known for: structuralism, empathy, introspection

Was a English psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the mind: structuralism. He created the largest doctoral program in the United States (at the time) after becoming a professor at Cornell University, and his first graduate student, Margaret Floy Washburn, became the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology (1894).

Main ideas

Titchener's ideas on how the mind worked were heavily influenced by Wundt's theory of voluntarism and his ideas of Association and Apperception (the passive and active combinations of elements of consciousness respectively). Titchener attempted to classify the structures of the mind in the way a chemist breaks down chemicals into their component parts—water into hydrogen and oxygen, for example. Thus, for Titchener, just as hydrogen and oxygen were structures, so were sensations and thoughts. He conceived of hydrogen and oxygen as structures of a chemical compound, and sensations and thoughts as structures of the mind. A sensation, according to Titchener, had four distinct properties: intensity, quality, duration, and extent. Each of these related to some corresponding quality of stimulus, although some stimuli were insufficient to provoke their relevant aspect of sensation. He further differentiated particular types of sensations: auditory sensation, for example, he divided into "tones" and "noises." Ideas and perceptions he considered to be formed from sensations; "ideational type" was related to the type of sensation on which an idea was based, e.g., sound or vision, a spoken conversation or words on a page.
Titchener believed that if the basic components of the mind could be defined and categorised that the structure of mental processes and higher thinking could be determined. What each element of the mind is, how those elements interact with each other and why they interact in the ways that they do was the basis of reasoning that Titchener used in trying to find structure to the mind.

Introspection

The main tool that Titchener used to try to determine the different components of consciousness was introspection. Unlike Wundt's method of introspection, Titchener had very strict guidelines for the reporting of an introspective analysis. The subject would be presented with an object, such as a pencil. The subject would then report the characteristics of that pencil (color, length, etc.). The subject would be instructed not to report the name of the object (pencil) because that did not describe the raw data of what the subject was experiencing. Titchener referred to this as stimulus error.
In "Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice", Titchener detailed the procedures of his introspective methods precisely. As the title suggests, the manual was meant to encompass all of experimental psychology despite its focus on introspection. To Titchener, there could be no valid psychological experiments outside of introspection, and he opened the section "Directions to Students" with the following definition: "A psychological experiment consists of an introspection or a series of introspections made under standard conditions.^"
This manual of Titchener's provided students with in-depth outlines of procedure for experiments on optical illusions, Weber's Law, visual contrast, after-images, auditory and olfactory sensations, perception of space, ideas, and associations between ideas, as well as descriptions proper behaviour during experiments and general discussion of psychological concepts. Titchener wrote another instructive manual for students and two more for instructors in the field (Hothersall 2004, p. 142). The level of detail Titchener put into these manuals reflected his devotion to a scientific approach to psychology. He argued that all measurements were simply agreed-upon "conventions" and subscribed to the belief that psychological phenomena, too, could be systematically measured and studied. Titchener put great stock in the systematic work of Gustav Fechner, whose psychophysics advanced the notion that it was indeed possible to measure mental phenomena (Titchener 1902, p. cviii- cix).
The majority of experiments were to be performed by two trained researchers working together, one functioning as the "observer" (O) and the other as the "experimenter" (E). The experimenter would set up the experiment and record the introspection made by his or her partner. After the first run of any experiment, the researchers were to then switch roles and repeat the experiment. Titchener placed a great deal of emphasis on the importance of harmony and communication between the two memberships in these partnerships. Communication, in particular, was necessary, because illness or agitation on the part of the observer could affect the outcome of any given experiment.

Life and legacy

Titchener was a charismatic and forceful speaker. However, although his idea of structuralism thrived while he was alive and championing for it, structuralism did not live on after his death. Some modern reflections on Titchener consider the narrow scope of his psychology and the strict, limited methodology he deemed acceptable as a prominent explanation for the fall of Titchener's structuralism after his death. So much of it was wrapped up in Titchener's precise, careful dictations that without him, the field floundered. Structuralism, along with Wundt's voluntarism, were both effectively challenged and improved upon, though they did influence many schools of psychology today.
Titchener was known for bringing some part of Wundt's structuralism to America, but with a few modifications. For example, whereas Wilhelm Wundt emphasised the relationship between elements of consciousness, Titchener focused on identifying the basic elements themselves. In his textbook An Outline of Psychology (1896), Titchener put forward a list of more than 44,000 elemental qualities of conscious experience.
Titchener is also remembered for coining the English word "empathy" in 1909 as a translation of the German word "Einfühlungsvermögen", a new phenomenon explored at the end of 19th century mainly by Theodor Lipps. "Einfühlungsvermögen" was later re-translated as "Empathie", and is still in use that way in German. It should be stressed that Titchener used the term "empathy" in a personal way, strictly intertwined with his methodological use of introspection, and to refer to at least three differentiable phenomena.
Titchener's effect on the history of psychology, as it is taught in classrooms, was partially the work of his student Edwin Boring. Boring's experimental work was largely unremarkable, but his book History of Experimental Psychology was widely influential, as, consequentially, were his portrayals of various psychologists, including his own mentor Edward Titchener. The length at which Boring detailed Titchener's contributions—contemporary Hugo Münsterberg received roughly a tenth as much of Boring's attention—raise questions today as to whether or not the influence credited to Titchener on the history of psychology is inflated as a result.
Professor Titchener received honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin. He became a charter member of the American Psychological Association, translated Külpe's Outlines of Psychology and other works, became the American editor of Mind in 1894, and associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology in 1895, and wrote several books. In 1904, he founded the group "The Experimentalists," which continues today as the "Society of Experimental Psychologists". Titchener's brain was contributed to the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell.

Anne Treisman

Born: 27 February 1935 Wakefield, Yorkshire, England
Residence: New York City, United States
Known for: Feature integration theory, Attenuation theory
Notable awards: National Medal of Science (2011)

Anne Marie Treisman is a psychologist currently at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. She researches visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with G. Gelade in 1980. Treisman has taught at Oxford, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley and Princeton. In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the study of attention. During her long career, Treisman has experimentally and theoretically defined the issue of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects that guide human thought and action.

Feature Integration Theory

Treisman's Feature Integration Theory proposes a two-stage model of object perception:

Pre-Attentive Stage

The first stage is called “pre-attentive” because it happens automatically, or without effort or attention by the perceiver. In this stage, an object is broken down into its elementary features for processing (i.e., color, texture, shape, etc.). Treisman posits we are unaware of this stage of attention because it occurs quickly and early in perceptual processes (before conscious awareness). Evidence for the pre-attentive state comes from Treisman's own studies. Treisman created a display of four objects flanked by two black numbers. The display flashed on a computer screen for 1/5 of a second and followed by a random-dot masking field to eliminate residual perception of the stimuli after the stimuli were turned off. Participants were asked to first report on the black numbers, followed by what they saw at each of the four locations where the shapes had been. Under these conditions, participants reported seeing illusory conjunctions in 18% of trials. That is, participants reported seeing objects that consisted of a combination of features from two different stimuli. For example, after seeing a big yellow circle, a big blue triangle, a small red triangle, and a small green circle, a person might report seeing a small red circle and a small green triangle. The reason illusory conjunctions occurred is that stimuli were presented rapidly and the observers' attention was distracted from the target object by having them focus on the black numbers; thus, elementary features had not yet been grouped or bound to an object. Having participants attend to the target objects eliminated the illusory conjunction

Focused Attention Stage

The second stage of processing depends on attention. In this stage, the features are recombined, so we perceive the whole object rather than individual features.
Treisman links the process of binding that occurs in the focused attention stage to physiology by noting that an object causes activity in both the '’what'’ and '’where'’ streams of the cortex (see Two-streams hypothesis). Activity in the '’what'’ stream would include information about color and form, while activity in the '’where'’ stream would include information about location and motion. According to Treisman, attention is the "glue" that combines the information from both streams and causes us to perceive all the features of an object as combined at one specific location. It is easy to consider perceiving one object in isolation, but when we consider multiple objects, numerous features exist at many locations. The perceptual system's task is to associate each of these features with the object to which it belongs. Feature integration theory proposes that in order for this to occur, we need to focus our attention on each object in turn. Once we attend to a particular location, the features at that location are bound together and are associated with the object at that location.
Treisman repeated the illusory conjunction experiment, but now instructed participants to ignore the flanking numbers and focus their attention on the four target objects. Focused attention eliminated illusory conjunctions.
Treisman's FIT model now uses three different spatially selective mechanisms to solve the binding problem: selection by a spatial attention window, inhibition of locations from feature maps containing unwanted features, and top-down activation of the location containing the currently attended object.

Impact

William James discussed the connection between attention and mental processes, "Millions of items…are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to…Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.^"
In the early 1980s, neuroscientists such as Torston Wiesel and David H. Hubel were discovering that different areas of the primate visual cortex were finely tuned to selective features, such as line orientation, luminance, color, movement, etc. These findings prompted the question of how these distinct features are connected into a unified whole, e.g., the binding problem. For example, when you see a red ball roll by, cells sensitive to movement fire in the medial temporal cortex, while cells sensitive to color, shape and location fire in other areas. Despite all this distinct neuronal firing, you don't perceive the ball as separated by shape, movement and color perceptions; you experience an integrated experience with all these components occurring together. The question of how these elements are combined is the essence of the binding problem and continued into the late 1990s. A number of possible mechanisms were envisaged, including grandmother cells responding to specific conjunctions of features that uniquely identify a particular object; local cell assemblies onto which the pathways from different feature maps converge, perhaps with adjustable connections allowing flexible routing of signals; a serial scan of different spatial areas selected by an adjustable attention window, conjoining the features that each contains and excluding features from adjacent areas;^[10] detection of temporal contiguity – parts and properties whose onset, offset or motion coincide probably belong to the same object synchronised firing of cells responding to features of the same object, perhaps assisted by oscillatory neural activity. Treisman used failures of binding to shed light on its underlying mechanisms. Specifically, she found that left-brain-damaged patients have increasing illusory conjunctions and decreased performance in a spatially cued attention task, which suggests a link between attentional binding and the parietal lobes. Treisman also cited corroborating evidence from positron emission tomography and event-related potential studies which were consistent with the spatial attention account of feature integration.
Treisman's work has formed the basis for thousands of experiments in cognitive psychology, vision sciences, cognitive science, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Honors

Treisman was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1989, the US National Academy of Sciences in 1994, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995, as well as a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 2002. Treisman was the recipient of the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for her explanation of how our brains build meaningful images from what we see.