'Considerations of sensations of all kinds came to hold less and less fascination for laboratory-oriented physiologists from [the 1920s]... psychological researchers were beginning to take on laboratory-centred identities that did not rely on prior recognition of physiological expertise. Mitchell Ash thus notes the significance of the cinematographic tachistoscope for the establishment of laboratory-centred psychology in Germany. As Ash highlights, tachistoscopic studies marked the culmination of long-standing trends within German academies in which psychology began to emerge as an independent, experimental discipline (Ash 1998, esp. 125-129).'

'In his 1922 reference to psychological time as the only alternative to his own physical time, Einstein appealed not then to a field in which contentions regarding the nature of mind could directly inform studies of the nature of bodies, but rather to an increasingly laboratory-based discipline that addressed questions that at least nominally fell outside of the purview of physiological research. It is significant in this respect that he had since at least 1916 cultivated a close relationship with one of the pioneers of experimental psychology in Germany, Max Wertheimer. In 1922 Einstein asked Wertheimer to deputise for him at the League of Nations' Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, over which Bergson presided. In the same year, in the first of a number of such letters, he also penned a recommendation for him (to Moritz Schlick at Kiel) on the basis of both his personal acquaintance and his psychological expertise. Beginning in 1910, Wertheimer had contended that sensation could not be studied by reference to individually-isolatable sense-impressions, but was rather apprehensible only in terms of an immediately-perceptible whole or 'Gestalt'. Wertheimer's collaborators Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler invited their students to engage with Bergson in their seminars. But it was in the laboratory that the latter's critique of associationism had its greatest influence. 'Though he did not cite Bergson', Ash notes, Wertheimer's tachistoscope studies 'provided empirical evidence for the claims the Frenchman had made' (Ash 1998, 69, 128-129).'