Gestalt schools of psychology-Kohler

Gestalt psychology was founded by Witt Harmo, Kohler and Kaufka in 19 10 to 19 12 at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Its official symbol is the paper "Experimental Research on Motion Perception" published by Witt Harmo in 19 12. Gestalt psychology is also called. Gestalt psychology? Or? Gestalt? . Gestalt school believes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and advocates that psychology should study the experience and behavior of the whole. It begins with opposing the psychology of foundationalism or constructivism. Later, he also opposed the reductionism of behaviorism. Gestalt psychology is a very important school in the development history of western psychology, and its representatives are Witt Harmo, Kohler, Kaufka and Lei Wen. Kohler's epiphany study opposed Thorndike's trial-and-error learning theory. He thinks that the experimental environment designed by Thorndike is too complicated, and it is difficult for animals to observe the whole picture of the environment, so they can only succeed by trial and error again and again. His own experiments are not like this, but let the animals see the whole picture of the experimental environment as much as possible, so that the subjects can understand it by observing the whole picture.

Generally speaking, epiphany has four characteristics: first, epiphany depends on situational conditions, and epiphany will only appear when learners can understand the relationship between the parts of the problem; Second, epiphany often happens after a stage of trial and error; Third, epiphany is qualitative change; Fourth, epiphany is portable. Epiphany learning does not depend on simple trial and error or repeated practice. The key is that individuals should understand the relationship between various stimuli in the overall situation and grasp the situation as a whole. In this way, the epiphany naturally happened.

Kohler 19 18' s experiment of pecking rice by chickens denies behaviorism's theory of mechanical learning transfer. Kohler's experiment is like this:

Put the millet on two pieces of paper, light gray and medium gray, and put the chicken in this case. If the chicken pecks the millet on light gray paper, drive it away; If you peck the millet on the gray paper, let it go on. In this way, let the chicks learn the relationship between gray (stimulation) and pecking (reaction). After many times of practice, the only thing that chicks can really learn to peck is the millet on medium gray paper. At this point, the experimenter changed the experimental situation and changed the colors of the two pieces of paper to medium gray and dark gray respectively. According to behaviorist s? R formula, chickens should peck millet on medium gray paper as before. However, this is not the case. Instead, the chicken pecked the millet on the dark gray paper.

Kohler believes that the reason why chickens peck millet on dark gray paper later is not to respond to a fixed single stimulus feature, but to the relative relationship of colors in the whole stimulus situation. Learning transfer is the transfer of relationship and structure, that is, gestalt.