Köhler sought to show that learning is:

Concept

Gestalt psychology holds that a learner responds to the whole organised field of a problem, not to its elements one at a time. Insight learning is the moment the learner mentally restructures that whole field and perceives how its parts stand in relation to one another and to the goal.

On this account learning is an organised internal process: understanding is reorganised inside the learner, and the overt movement that follows is the expression of that reorganisation rather than its cause.

Application

Köhler’s chimpanzee studies at Tenerife are the classic demonstration. Fruit was placed out of reach and the animal, after a pause in which no rewarded fumbling took place, joined two short sticks into a single long tool, or stacked crates beneath the fruit, and then carried out the retrieval in one smooth uninterrupted attempt.

Three features of that behaviour carried the argument: the solution appeared suddenly rather than by slow improvement, it was complete on its first execution, and it transferred to fresh but structurally similar problems. Köhler read those features as the signature of a mental reorganisation of the situation. Among the offered descriptions, “a cognitive operation” names exactly that mental organisation.

Contrast

• “An autonomous random activity” describes undirected movement, which is the trial-and-error picture of learning that Köhler set his experiments against.

• “A situation in which individuals are superior to animals” compares species; Köhler in fact used animals to argue that insight is not exclusively human, so this is not the point his work established.

• “The perception of different parts of the situation” breaks the field into separate elements, which is the element-by-element analysis Gestalt psychology was formed to oppose; Gestalt studies the organisation of the whole.

Result

Köhler’s experiments therefore support the view that learning is a cognitive operation — an internal reorganisation of the problem situation.