Pál Ranschburg

Pál Ranschburg (born January 3, 1870 in Győr , † January 13, 1945 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian experimental psychologist and psychiatrist .

Life

In 1899 he founded Hungary's first psychological laboratory. In 1918 he became professor of psychology in Budapest. In 1928 he founded the Hungarian Society for Child Research and the Hungarian Society for Psychology. Leopold Szondi and Paul Harkai Schiller were students of Ranschburg.

plant

He carried out memory experiments with both sick and healthy people: when reading or repeating series of numbers, the test subjects made more mistakes, the more similar the numbers were and the closer they were to one another. In 1902 he called this the law of homogeneous escapement . It says that similar learning elements are fused together and therefore cannot be learned well, while heterogeneous content can be learned better at the same time. This Ranschburg inhibition is seen today as a special case of interference in learning (see memory inhibition ). Hugo Münsterberg took up his research in his first work psychological research at Harvard University and made studies on monotony in the workplace ( Die Psychologie und das Wirtschaftsleben , 1913).

Ranschburg also dealt with the learning failure of children in learning to read and write as well as with arithmetic weaknesses. In 1916 he coined the terms dyslexia and arithmasthenia . In choosing the basic word asthenia (= constitutional or congenital weakness), which was common at the time , he indicated his view of the phenomena. For him, reading weakness was an expression of a “lasting backwardness of a higher degree in the intellectual development of the child” (1928). In the case of poor reading skills, this led to enrollment in the special school until the 1960s, although Maria Linder had already proven in 1951 that many 'dyslexics' are normal or above average intelligent.

Fonts

• 1901: Apparatus and method for examining optical memory for medical and educational-psychological purposes . In: Monthly magazine for psychiatry and neurology . Vol. 10, H. 5, pp. 321-333.
• 1902: On inhibition of simultaneous irritative effects. Experimental contribution to the theory of the conditions of attention . In: Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sensory Organs. Vol. 30, pp. 39-86.
• 1916: The reading weakness ( dyslexia ) and arithmetic weakness ( arithmasthenia ) of school children in the light of the experiment . Published by Julius Springer, Berlin 1916.
• 1928: The reading and writing disorders of childhood . C. Marhold, Halle ad Saale.

literature

• György Kiss (1999 ² ): The history of experimental psychology in Hungary. In Helmut E. Lück , Rudolf Miller (ed.): Illustrated history of psychology. Weinheim, ISBN 3-407-22138-X .

Web links

• Self-description of the Hungarian faculty (English)