Harry Kirke Wolfe - Education

Education

Wolfe was in one of the first students to enter the, then fledgling school, University of Nebraska. He arrived in a time of much controversy for the University, people were unsure if the state could afford to support a university. There was much controversy within the university as well as the curriculum was expanded to include medicine, agriculture, and engineering as well as the establishment of mandatory chapel, military drill and the addition of religious instruction. For an unknown reason Wolfe was excused for two of his four years of compulsory military drills. Wolfe studied a diverse range of topics during his schooling and after a rough start, he was a very successful student in his Junior and Senior years earning nine As and 3 Bs. As a senior Wolfe took a course that would eventually have ties to his later career, a year-long mandatory class for all seniors: mental and moral philosophy. Wolfe earned undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska in 1880.

Though he could have continued his education at one of many American graduate programs, Wolfe decided instead to travel to the University of Berlin which was well known at the time for its innovative curriculum. Upon arrival in Berlin Wolfe began to pursue a degree in the classics with the intention of returning to the United States as a college or university professor. Very little is known about Wolfe’s three year stay in Germany though it is known that he took a course entitled “Psychology” and one called “Fundamentals of Experimental Psychology” in his second semester. Both of these classes were taught by Hermann Ebbinghaus. Wolfe earned undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska in 1880.

In the fall of 1884 Wolfe ended his time in Berlin, for unknown reasons, and traveled to Leipzig to study with Wilhelm Wundt. A possible explanation for this is that Ebbinghaus did not have professorial rank and was unable to supervise Wolfe’s doctoral thesis, which he would write in psychology, no longer pursuing a degree in classics. Wolfe was only the second American student to earn a degree under Wundt (the first being James McKeen Cattell).

In 1886 Wolfe published his doctoral thesis on tonal memory. Wolfe chose to investigate retention by the method of recognition, a method that requires a stimulus to be present and the subject to make a judgment about the stimulus. This paradigm lends itself well to psychophysical methods which are what Wolfe used in his research on memory for tones. He believed that recognition memory was a simpler and more basic memory process that recognized objects or events as familiar or unfamiliar.