After being introduced to some of the major areas within psychology, I am most interested in learning more about Developmental Psychology. Developmental psychology is about the study of how we age, mature, and develop over time. This branch of psychology allows us to understand how we act the way we do at different ages, such as an infant to adulthood. It also goes in depth about how various skills, such as cognitive skills, social skills, and moral reasoning, evolve and change as we age. From this section, I started to realize how these various skills can evolve differently based on a person's environment. For example, two different parents can teach, train, or tell their child completely different ideas and thoughts. These actions influence their child to think and behave similarly to their parents, which allows everyone in the world to have different ideas, opinions, and perspectives regarding to different topics and ideas. Reading about this branch of psychology allowed me to learn a lot about the complexity of human growth and how our unique life experiences contribute to who be become.

I have seen this optical illusion before, where a person might see a duck at first, then see a rabbit. Examples of sensation in this image are the lines, curves, and shades from the drawing, which are the same for everyone who looks at the image. However, the fact that people can either see the image as a duck and rabbit illustrates that perception is always changing. Perception is about how your brain decides what it sees and allows two people to see the exact same event, but interpret it differently.

This metaphor really helped me understand Gestalt Psychology. I was able to understand this example because when I listen to music, I don’t only focus on each separate note but rather on the overall sound and story the song tells me. Thanks to this great example, I understand how Gestalt Psychology mainly focuses on how people can organize and perceive things as unified thoughts rather than just separate parts.

This is an example of the development of the empirical method, where scientist start to use more objective such as the usages of examinations or recording devices. Instead of using opinion-based methods to examine mental activities, like Wundt's idea of introspection, James use functionalism to properly focus on how mental activities helped an organism fit into its environment using test and experiments.

Wundt's view of psychology as a study of conscious experience was the start of psychology and I find it really interesting how this one though created the formal beginning of psychology. Wundt's usage of introspection (a process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible) is an early and significant way for Wundt to study the human mind. However, these experiences can be totally subjective from the actual person. How can one's experience be verified by another? I thought that introspection was an unreliable way to study psychology. In addition, Wundt's belief in volunteerism (the concept in which people have free will) will slowly become a more popular idea now. Especially in the present time, many people feel as if they can choose their own path and make their own decisions, rather than their lives being prechosen for them.

An empirical method relies only on direct observations and experimentation, rather than using assumptions or beliefs. By using empirical methods, conclusions becomes testable and verifiable, reducing bias and assumptions.