APA Historical Database: Selected Entries

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On August 5:

1834 - Ewald Hering was born. Hering proposed a theory of color vision based on three types of receptors operating by opponent processes to detect black-white, yellow-blue, and red-green differences in stimulation. Hering's theory strongly influenced modern theories of color vision.

1903 - Rensis Likert was born. Likert studied attitude scaling, industrial psychology, and public opinion. Likert developed the familiar 7-point rating scale attitude measurement system that he called the method of summated ratings, but that is commonly called Likert scaling.

1917 - U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker created the Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army. Psychologist Walter Dill Scott had vigorously promoted objective means of identifying officer candidates in the army and became director of the committee. Edward L. Thorndike, Walter V. Bingham, James R. Angell, Raymond Dodge, John F. Shepard, Edward K. Strong, Lewis M. Terman, John B. Watson, and Robert M. Yerkes were members of the committee.

1947 - The first Scandinavian Meeting of Psychologists was held in Oslo. About 400 psychologists from Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway attended. Presiding officer Harald Schjelderup addressed the gathering on the importance of psychology in winning the war and consolidating the peace.

1966 - Saul Sternberg's article "High Speed Scanning in Human Memory" was published in Science. This article reported that the time taken to detect an item in short-term memory is proportional to the number of items in memory. It is frequently cited in introductory psychology texts.

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