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Kohler
Wolfgang Köhler (January 21, 1887 – June 11, 1967) was a German psychologist who, with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, founded Gestalt psychology. more...
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Early life
Köhler was born in the port city of Reval (now Tallinn), the capital of and largest city in Estonia, which was a German province then. His family was of German origin, and shortly after his birth, they moved back to that country. There, raised in a setting of teachers, nurses and other scholars, he developed lifelong interests in the sciences as well as the arts, and especially in music.
Education
In the course of his university education, Köhler studied at the University of Tübingen (1905-06), the University of Bonn (1906-07) and the University of Berlin (1907-09). While a student at the latter, he focused on the link between physics and psychology, in the course of which he studied with two leading scholars in those fields, Max Planck and Carl Stumpf, respectively. In completing his Ph.D., for which his dissertation addressed certain aspects of psycho-acoustics, Stumpf was his major professor.
Gestalt Psychology
In 1910-13, he was an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt where he worked with fellow psychologists Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. He and Koffka functioned as subjects for Wertheimer’s now-famous studies of apparent movement (or the phi phenomenon), which led them in turn to conclusions about the inherent nature of vision. They collaborated on the founding of a new holistic attitude toward psychology called Gestalt theory (from the German word for “form” or “configuration”), aspects of which are indebted to the earlier work of Stumpf (Köhler’s teacher) and Christian von Ehrenfels (whose lectures at the University of Prague Wertheimer had attended).
Problem solving
In 1913, Köhler left Frankfort for the island of Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, where he had been named the director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences anthropoid research station. He remained there for six years, during which he wrote a book on problem solving titled The Mentality of Apes (1917). In this research, Köhler observed the manner in which chimpanzees solve problems, such as that of retrieving bananas when positioned out of reach. He found that they stacked wooden crates to use as makeshift ladders, in order to retrieve the food. If the bananas were placed on the ground outside of the cage, they used sticks to lengthen the reach of their arms. Köhler concluded that the chimps had not arrived at these methods through trial-and-error (which American behavorist Edward Thorndike had claimed to be the basis of all animal learning), but rather that they had experienced an insight (also sometimes known as an “aha experience”), in which, having realized the answer, they then proceeded to carry it out in a way that was, in Köhler’s words, “unwaveringly purposeful.”
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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