Harvey A. Carr

Harvey A. Carr (1873 to 1954) was an American psychologist and a founding figure of functionalist psychology, born in Morris, Illinois. He studied at DePauw University and the University of Colorado, then did graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he worked closely with John Dewey, James Rowland Angell and John B. Watson, and defended his dissertation on a visual illusion of motion in 1905. He worked with Watson on the well known Kerplunk experiment, took charge of animal studies at Chicago in 1908, and chaired the psychology department from 1926 to 1938. His own research centered on spatial perception, maze learning and animal cognition, and was marked by a careful, skeptical and controlled approach. He supervised 53 doctoral dissertations, among them that of William Blatz, and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1926. He also edited the Journal of Experimental Psychology and the Journal of General Psychology.