This paper intends to offer more exact information about Oswald Külpe and his application of the experimental method on cognitive processes. How do we think? Are perceptive images always necessary to create our thinking? What is the speed of our thinking and how do we solve problems? With the support of his students - several of them were to be eminent psychologists - he improved the methods of observation and the analysis of the results. Before joining definitively psychology, for a long time he was divided between history and psychology and even using experimental methods considered psychology as belonging to the area of philosophy. In his conference of 1912, he presented as a synthesis the existence of imageless thinking, the central role of the Ego in thinking activity and the dominant tendency of the thinking task in problem solving. After Würzburg the schools of Colonia, Mannheim and Amsterdam continued the studies with new approaches for deaf-mute children education, discovering levels of conscience and the application of the new concepts about thinking and problem solving in primary school teaching. It was mainly this last point that was further developed by Kohnstamm emphasizing the practices of silent reading as a method to reach the full development of intellectual capacities of children.
pioneer cognitivists; influence of Külpe's school; start of cognitivism
