Georg Elias Müller

Georg Elias Müller (born July 20, 1850, Grimma, Saxony—died Dec. 23, 1934, Göttingen, Ger.) was a German psychologist who, as director of one of the major centres of psychological research at the University of Göttingen (1881–1921), contributed to the advancement of knowledge of sensations, memory, learning, and colour vision.

Müller received a Ph.D. from Göttingen (1873) for his basic analysis of sensory attention. He was appointed Privatdozent, or lecturer, at Göttingen in 1876 and wrote Toward a Foundation of Psychophysics (1878), in which he dealt primarily with Weber’s law concerning the stimulus–sensory intensity relationship. Initially he concerned himself mainly with perceptual thresholds. A noteworthy outcome was the knowledge that day-to-day fluctuations in individual thresholds are the result of individual variations in sensitivity. His papers on the sensory discrimination of weights (1899), revealing the effect of anticipation on discrimination, may also be viewed as one of the early experimental studies of attitude.

By the mid-1890s Müller began extending the pioneer efforts of the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus on memory and learning and also began exploring the stimulus–response relation in vision. He made a thorough analysis of Ebbinghaus’ methods and began to distinguish the active processes, such as conscious organization, in learning. He maintained that learning is not mechanical and is not accounted for by contiguous associations. He also suggested that there is an active effort to find relations and that judgment involves such components as anticipated sensations and feelings, as well as doubt, hesitation, and readiness. In his work on colour vision he suggested that the brain adds a gray to retinally induced colours. Though these principles were later partly adopted by Gestalt psychology, Müller declared his opposition to the Gestalt approach in 1923. His Outline of Psychology (1924) was among his final works.