What significance did Weber’s work have for the development of experimental psychology? In your answer, describe Weber’s research techniques and his findings.
Ernst Heinrich Weber was born in Wittenberg and was the son of a theology professor. He was a well-known physiologist that was keenly interested in the kinesthesis (refers to the study of muscle sense) and touch sense. He was considered as the first person to postulate that the touch sensation is consisting of several different senses and also give evidenced about muscle sense.
Weber hypothesized that the touch sensation could be achieved by discriminating the body against the spatial separation of the two points of touch by a compass-like device that applied two points of pressure against a subject’s skin. The smallest distance between the two points at which the subject analyzed sensing of two points instead of one was known as the two-point threshold. He found that the tongue has about 1 mm smallest two-point threshold and back of the neck has about 60 mm largest two-point threshold that resulted from the anatomical arrangements of the touch’s sense receptors.
Weber’s research on the muscle sense was also more important than the research on the touch in the history of psychology. He adopted weight-discrimination experiments that determined the smallest difference between two weights. In this, he lifts one weight (the standard) and then lifts another weight that the varying weights were lighter, heavier and same as the standard weight. He reported that when the variable weight was slight different from the standard, the standard comes out to be same.