The Psychological Contributions of Margaret Floy Washburn
Mabel F. Martin
Northampton State Hospital
Best known for her work in animal psychology, Professor Washburn made original contributions in an incredible variety of other fields that might have seemed unrelated to a mind of less encyclopedic scope. If Spearman is right in identifying general intelligence with the capacity to discover relationships, Miss Washburn had it to a remarkable degree. She found relationships between such diverse phenomena as organic sensations and social consciousness.
Her originality early attracted attention, her keen critical ability commanded respect, and her warm personality won lasting friends. Students and younger psychologists found Miss Washburn always approachable and encouraging. In meetings of the American Psychological Association, it was her, custom to speak to any younger member who appeared lonely or shy and to help the newcomer to become acquainted. While the world mourns the scientist, those who knew her personally mourn a gracious, charming woman of wide sympathy and unfailing tact.
Miss Washburn's strenuous teaching and administrative duties never interfered with her own research. Productive scholarship was her vocation from her student days to the very end of her busy professorship. Her earliest publication reported experiments on the perception of distance in the inverted landscape.[1] A year later came an article on the influence of visual associations on the-space perceptions of the skin.[2] Next came a study of the process of recognition[3] and shortly thereafter a discussion of the psychology of deductive logic.[4]
Trained by Titchener, Miss Washburn was always interested in the subjective side of experience, including images. In 1899, she published the first of her many investigations of after-images.[5] Her article in the Hall Festschrift, in 1903,[6] foreshadowed four areas of interest in which she was to make significant contributions to psychology—the problems of
( 8) social consciousness, the problems of revived and ideated emotions, the r le of movement in the development of mental life, and the field of animal psychology. It is impossible to label them first, second, third, and fourth, because they are so intimately intertwined in this one short, pregnant article.
As early as 1900 she had begun to doubt the validity of the extreme structuralist position. In 1903, she wrote,