Wilhelm Wundt
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40 free Wilhelm Wundt trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Wilhelm Wundt is the reason psychology has laboratories. Trained as a physician, he decided that the mind could be studied with instruments, timing and careful observation, and in 1879 he set up the first laboratory built for exactly that. Students came from across Europe and America, then went home and founded departments of their own. This quiz collects the fun facts behind the textbook name: his unlikely first publication, his years in politics, the optical illusion that carries his name, the famous pupils he trained and the staggering amount he wrote. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story as you play. It suits psychology students revising the history of the field, teachers who want a quick classroom warm-up, and anyone curious about how the study of the mind became a science.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which German city did Wilhelm Wundt open the world's first psychology laboratory in 1879?
Leipzig
Leipzig gave Wundt a room in 1876 just to store instruments he had brought from Switzerland; by 1879 it was the first laboratory devoted purely to psychological research.
Q 02Hugo Eckener earned a psychology doctorate under Wilhelm Wundt, then won world fame commanding what kind of craft?
Airships
Airships made Eckener a household name: he commanded the Graf Zeppelin on the first airship flight around the world, decades after finishing his thesis in 1892.
Q 03Wilhelm Wundt's first scientific paper, published in 1853 while he studied medicine, measured the salt content of what?
Urine
Urine was the subject: Wundt's debut measured its sodium chloride content and appeared in only his third year as a medical student.
Q 04Vundtia, which carries the number 635 and honours Wilhelm Wundt, is what kind of object?
An asteroid
An asteroid: 635 Vundtia orbits the Sun, and its opening V matches how Germans pronounce the first letter of Wundt.
Q 05Which method did Wilhelm Wundt pair with strict laboratory controls to study conscious experience at first hand?
Introspection
Introspection, for Wundt, had firm rules: observers had to know when the event was coming, and each observation had to be repeatable under the same conditions.
Q 06After World War I, most of Wilhelm Wundt's personal library was sold to a university in which country?
Japan
Japan's Tohoku University in Sendai bought the books during Germany's postwar hardship and still holds more than 6,700 volumes from Wundt's shelves.
Q 07For which honour was the physician-turned-psychologist Wilhelm Wundt nominated three times without ever winning?
A Nobel Prize
A Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was the target of all three nominations, a nod to Wundt's first career as a doctor and nerve researcher.
Q 08By psychologist Edwin Boring's count, roughly how many pages did Wilhelm Wundt publish over 68 years?
About 50,000
About 50,000 is the right scale: Boring's tally came to 53,735 pages, or 2.2 pages written or revised every single day for 68 years.
Q 09Sigmund Freud often quoted Wilhelm Wundt, but which concept did Wundt refuse to build his own psychology on?
The unconscious
The unconscious left Wundt sceptical: he held that the exact description of consciousness was the sole aim of experimental psychology.
Q 10Wilhelm Wundt, a trained physician, served as an army doctor during which nineteenth-century conflict?
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 put Wundt back in a doctor's role; within four years he had published the textbook that launched experimental psychology.
Q 11Pleasant–unpleasant, tense–relaxed and excited–depressed were the three dimensions in Wilhelm Wundt's theory of what?
Emotions
Emotions, Wundt argued, could be placed along three separate scales, and he tested the idea by recording pulse and breathing while feelings were provoked.
Q 12Which physicist, famed for his work on the conservation of energy, took Wilhelm Wundt on as assistant in 1858?
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann von Helmholtz had Wundt teach the physiology laboratory course, a post that drilled him in the standards of experimental research he later applied to the mind.
Q 13Which English student of Wilhelm Wundt carried a version of his teacher's ideas to Cornell University as structuralism?
Edward Titchener
Q 21Neckarau, the birthplace of Wilhelm Wundt, is today a district of which German city on the Rhine?
Mannheim
Mannheim now includes Neckarau, which sits directly on the river in the city's southwest; Wundt left at about six when his family moved to another small Baden town.
Q 22Which Baden town did Wilhelm Wundt, then a university teacher, represent in the state assembly from 1866 to 1869?
Heidelberg
Heidelberg sent Wundt to the assembly as a member of the liberal Progressive Party, and he also co-founded a federation of German workers' associations.
Q 23Which founder of psychophysics had made his career at the university Wilhelm Wundt joined as professor in 1875?
Gustav Fechner
Edward Titchener translated Wundt into English while still at Oxford, then built what was then America's largest psychology doctoral program at Cornell.
Q 14Which early visitor to Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory became the first president of the American Psychological Association?
G. Stanley Hall
G. Stanley Hall had just earned America's first psychology doctorate, found no university jobs in the field, and sailed to Germany to see the new science at work.
Q 15Which American assistant to Wilhelm Wundt later became the first professor of psychology in the United States?
James McKeen Cattell
James McKeen Cattell took that chair at the University of Pennsylvania after his doctorate under Wundt, then spent decades as editor and publisher of the journal Science.
Q 16Emil Kraepelin, who trained in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory, helped lay the foundations of which branch of medicine?
Psychiatry
Psychiatry was Kraepelin's field, yet he stayed a disciple of Wundt for life, and his qualifying thesis argued for the place of psychology within it.
Q 17Wilhelm Wundt's student Hugo Münsterberg left Germany in 1892 to run the psychology laboratory at which university?
Harvard
Harvard invited him although he spoke no English at the time; he learned fast, and his push to apply psychology to everyday problems set him against Wundt's pure-science view.
Q 18Charles Spearman, an English army officer who studied under Wilhelm Wundt, later proposed which famous idea?
General intelligence
General intelligence, a single g factor behind varied test scores, was proposed by Spearman, who had quit the army after 15 years to take up experimental psychology.
Q 19In which Swiss city was Wilhelm Wundt professor of inductive philosophy just before his famous German appointment?
Zurich
Zurich kept Wundt only briefly; in 1875 he carried his instruments north, and that equipment seeded the first psychology laboratory.
Q 20What was the profession of Maximilian Wundt, father of Wilhelm Wundt, in the Baden village where Wilhelm was born?
Lutheran minister
A Lutheran minister, Maximilian Wundt left much of his son's schooling to his assistant vicar, and the boy grew up to choose medicine over the pulpit.
Gustav Fechner had shown that the mind could be measured and treated mathematically, the very premise on which Wundt built his new laboratory.
Q 24Whom did Wilhelm Wundt himself, writing his memoirs, name as the true father of experimental psychology?
Ernst Weber
Ernst Weber earned the title, Wundt wrote, for being the first to think of measuring mental quantities and showing the exact relationships between them.
Q 25Which American thinker ranked second, behind Wilhelm Wundt, in a 1991 survey of psychology's all-time eminence?
William James
William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third when 31 American historians of psychology rated the field's greatest names.
Q 26Which German philosopher did Wilhelm Wundt quote on the title page of his 1862 book on sense perception?
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz supplied the motto: nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself. Wundt aimed it at pure empiricism.
Q 27Wilhelm Wundt placed a centre for which attention-directing process, the core of his theory, in the frontal cortex?
Apperception
Apperception was Wundt's name for the mind's active, selective grip on its contents, and he ranked it above the passive linking of ideas.
Q 28Which name is given to Wilhelm Wundt's own school of psychology for its stress on will and deliberate attention?
Voluntarism
Voluntarism treated the mind as active, with acts of will moving content into consciousness, a point his best-known English pupil later rejected.
Q 29Wilhelm Wundt's ten-volume Völkerpsychologie, written over his last two decades, traced the mind through which trio?
Language, myth and custom
Language, myth and custom were, in Wundt's view, history's own experiments: where the laboratory could not reach, culture showed how higher thought develops.
Q 30A German history museum holds a 1918 shellac disc on which Wilhelm Wundt can be heard doing what?
Reading a lecture
Reading a lecture: in his mid-eighties Wundt repeated the closing words of the inaugural address he had first given in Switzerland in 1874.