Encyclopedia, Difference between revisions of "Wolfgang Köhler" - New World

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Revision as of 14:10, 11 May 2007


File:Maluma.jpg
Maluma type shape
File:Takete.jpg
Takete type shape

Wolfgang Köhler (January 21, 1887, – June 11, 1967) , New Hampshire) was a German Gestalt psychologist. In 1909 he received his PhD from the University of Berlin. He became an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt, where he worked with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka.

Life

Wolfgang Köhler was born on January 21, 1887 in Reval (now Tallinn) in the Russian Empire (now Estonia).

From 1913 to 1920 he worked at the Anthropoid Station at Tenerife in the Canary Islands. There he wrote his book Mentality of Apes.

From 1922 until 1935 he was chair and director of the psychology institute at the University of Berlin. In 1929 he wrote his book Gestalt Psychology.

In 1929, he conducted an experiment in which he presented test participants with two drawings, one with only curved lines and one with only straight lines and angles. The participants were asked to name one of the drawings "Maluma" and the other "Takete" - two nonsense words. An overwhelming majority named the curved one Maluma and the angular one Takete. The test was made with participants from different cultures, which suggests that the preference was a universal one. The result of this experiment has been called the bouba/kiki effect.

In 1935 he moved to the USA and taught at Swarthmore College.

In 1956 he was elected the president of the American Psychological Association.

Köhler died on June 11, 1967 in Enfield, New Hampshire.

Work

Gestalt Psychology

Problem-solving

During his time at the Anthropoid Research Station in the Canary Islands, Köhler conducted numerous experiments on chimpanzees. He was interested in how chimpanzees were able to retrieve bananas suspended from the top of their enclosure. He observed them to stand on boxes, and even stack boxes on top of each other, to get closer to the food.

Köhler's work with chimpanzees led him to believe that animals, like humans, are capable of problem-solving. His studies revealed that apes are capable not only of trial-and-error learning that Edward Thorndike had asserted was the basis of all animal learning, but are also capable of what Köhler called "insight" learning—the "aha!" solution to problems. In this extract from The Mentality of Apes, he described the behavior of the chimpanzee Sultan employing a stick that was too short to reach a piece of fruit as a tool to reach a longer stick, which he then used to retrieve the fruit:

Sultan tries to reach the fruit with the smaller of the two sticks. Not succeeding, he tears at a piece of wire that projects from the netting of his cage, but that too is in vain ... He suddenly picks up the little stick once more, goes up to the bars directly opposite the long stick, scratches it towards him with the "auxiliary," seizes it, and goes with it to the point opposite the objective (the fruit), which he secures. (Köhler 1917)

It has been pointed out, however, that Köhler did not control well for prior experience or the possibility that the animals imitated each other's behavior. Thus, it is difficult to be sure that some trial-and-error learning had not occurred before the apparent "insight" giving the solution to the problem.

File:BoobaKiki.png
This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily: a remote tribe calls the shape on the left "kiki" and the one on the right "bouba".

The Bouba/Kiki Effect was discovered by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. He conducted tests in which a researcher displays two crudely drawn shapes, one jagged and one curvy, to an audience and asks, "Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?" No matter what languages the respondents speak, 98 percent will pick the curvy shape as bouba and the jagged one as kiki. This result suggests that the human brain is somehow able to extract abstract properties from the shapes and sounds.

Interestingly, individuals afflicted with autism do not show this effect. Where average people agree with the typical result 90% of the time, autistics only agree 60% of the time.[1]

Legacy

Major Works

  • Köhler, Wolfgang. [1917] 1976. The Mentality of Apes. W. W. Norton. ISBN 0871401088
  • Köhler, Wolfgang. [1938] 1976. The Place of Value in a World of Facts. Liveright Publishing Corporation. ISBN 087140107X
  • Köhler, Wolfgang. [1940] 1996. Dynamics in Psychology. Liveright Publishing Corporation. ISBN 0871402777
  • Köhler, Wolfgang. [1947] 2006. Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology. Liveright Publishing Corporation. ISBN 0871402181
  • Köhler, Wolfgang. 1969. The Task of Gestalt Psychology. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691024529
  • Köhler, Wolfgang. 1971. The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Kohler. Liveright Publishing Corporation. ISBN 087140253X

Notes

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Ash, Mitchell G. 1998. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521646278
  • Boring, E. G. 1950. A History of Experimental Psychology. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0133900398
  • Ley, Ronald. 1997. A Whisper of Espionage : Wolfgang Kohler and the Apes of Tenerife. Diane Publishing Company. ISBN 0788151347

External links


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