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Wholes perceive the wholes: the gestalt approach to perception and learning






 

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the opposite approach to study intelligence has been developed in parallel with behaviourism, basing on Gestalt Theory. The Gestalt approach to learning originated in Europe around 1912, with Max Wertheimer’s insights on perception and, initially, emphasised perceptual phenomena. “Gestalt” is the German word for “configuration”, or “organisation”. It also means any segregated whole.

Gestalt Theory focused on the whole perceptual experience and not on its elements. Gestalt theorists asserted that perception ought to be more than the sum of the things perceived, that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. At the same time, they considered the organism as being hardly divided into " mind" and " body", because it is the whole that reacts to the environment. The organism does not construct a perception by analysing a myriad data but rather perceive the form as a whole and is able to solve most problems not due to decomposition of the problem but to sudden insight that cannot be broken down into atomic processes.

Gestalt theory was established mainly by the research work of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kö hler, Kurt Koffka, and Kurt Lewin who were trying to find natural-science laws of integral behaviour. The coming to power of National Socialism in Germany substantially interrupted the fruitful scientific development of Gestalt theory in the German-speaking world; Koffka, Wertheimer, Kö hler and Lewin immigrated to the United States.

The term Gestalt as the Gestalt psychologists were to use it was firstly mentioned by the Austrian philosopher, Christian von Ehrenfels, in his paper " On Gestalt Qualities" (1890). This was the first definite claim that thousands of perceptions have characteristics which cannot be derived from the characteristics of their ultimate components, the so-called sensations. One of von Ehrenfels’ students was Max Wertheimer.

Wertheimer was born in Prague in 1880. He studied law and philosophy in Germany. In 1910, he became interested in the perceptions he experienced on a train travelling on a vacation. While stopped at the station, he bought a toy stroboscope - a spinning drum with slots to look through and pictures on the inside, sort of a primitive movie machine or sophisticated flip book. In a hotel room he set up the experiment by substituting strips of paper on which he had drawn series of lines for the pictures in the toy. The results were as he expected: by varying the time interval between the exposures of the lines, he found that he could see one line after another, two lines standing side by side, or a line moving from one position to another. At Frankfurt, his former teacher Friedrich Schumann, gave him the use of a tachistoscope to study the effect. His first subjects were two young Schumann’s assistants, Wolfgang Kö hler and Kurt Koffka. They would become Wertheimer’s lifelong partners.

In 1912 Wertheimer published his seminal paper: " Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement." This is listed as the birth of Gestalt Theory.

Gestalt principles are based on perception versus sensation. While sensation refers to simple, detectable simulation, perception infers an organisation and interpretation of sensations. The phi-phenomenon discussed by Wertheimer is the perception of movement from stationary stimuli which flash on and off at a certain frequency. The perception of several sensory elements in combination is often different from the sum of individual elements themselves. Gestalt psychologists study the perception of stimuli rather than the actual stimuli in relation with observable behaviour. This sets them apart from behaviourists.

Gestalt psychologists consider organisms with their perceived environment as the field. They borrowed the term “field” from physics where it was defined as a “dynamic inter-related system, any part of which influences every other part”.

The Gestalt psychologists argued that we are built to experience the structured whole as well as the individual sensations. And not only do we have the ability to do so, we have a strong tendency to do so. Perception of the whole does not depend on perception of all of its parts; we recognise the shape of a landscape way before we recognise each tree and rock in the landscape, and we recognise that a tree is a tree before we recognise what kind of tree it is, because recognising the species requires an analysis of its parts. A set of dots outlining the shape of a star is likely to be perceived as a star, not as a set of dots. We tend to complete the figure, make it the way it “should” be, finish it.

The question of whether non human animals are able to complete an amputated to a whole image has been intensively studied over the century and it remains an issue of the day. Most studies have used Pavlovian conditioned procedures in order to reveal these abilities in animals. After learning to discriminate between whole figures, subjects respond to pictures represented only by parts of them. Comparative studies demonstrated that members of some species including mice, pigeons and primates can perceive and discriminate complex stimuli based on either local parts or the global configuration, much like humans. However, comparative data give a complicated picture because for some species specificity of visual perception shades their ability to complete amputated images (see Vallortigara, 2004 for a detailed review).

Gestalt theory is well known for its concept of insight learning (see details in Chapter 17). The most famous example of insight learning in animals involved a chimpanzee named Sultan. He was presented with many different practical problems. When, for example, he had been allowed to play with sticks that could be put together like a fishing pole, he appeared to consider in a very human fashion the situation of the out-of-reach banana thoughtfully - and then rather suddenly jump up, assemble the poles, and reach the banana. Sultan was the most intelligent chimp among the first in the world chimpanzee colony established by Kö hler. He was working at a primate research facility maintained by the Prussian Academy of Sciences in the Canary Islands when the First World War broke out. Marooned there, Kö hler had at his disposal a colony of nine chimpanzees. He constructed a variety of problems for the chimps, each of which involved obtaining food that was not directly accessible. Chimpanzees appeared to demonstrate a holistic understanding of problems, by arriving at solutions in a sudden moment of revelation or insight (see Chapter 17).

Kö hler described his findings in “The Mentality of apes”. It was published in German in 1917 and translated into English in 1925. This is still one of the most referable books on cognitive ethology. It is important to note that Kö hler’s long term experimental work was the first systematic study of animal intelligence based on Gestalt principles and may be considered a new phase in the development of comparative psychology.

At the same time with Kö hler, Russian zoo-psychologist Nadezhda Ladygina-Kohts bought a young chimpanzee named Ioni with whom she was thoroughly working during 3 years (Fig. I-1). This work was based at Moscow Darwinian Museum being established by her husband and one of her first professors in Moscow University Alexander Kohts. This museum was initially established in 1907 as a scientific collection for the first High Courses for Women in Russia. Ladygina-Kohts was the first curator of the Darwinian Museum. Just married, young couple of scientists enthusiastically gathered the displays for their Museum. Basing on the Darwinian Museum, Ladygina-Kohts established a laboratory of experimental Psychology. When a girl, she dreamt of being psychiatrist, and Ioni became her very first “patient” and at the same time the first experimental chimpanzee in Russia (and one of the first in the World, indeed). Ladygina-Kohts conducted many experiments on learning and tool using with Ioni in 1913-1916, and compared her observations of an infant chimpanzee in her laboratory with those of her own son, Rudy, in 1925-29. Her first book “Investigation of learning capacity in chimpanzee” was published in 1923, and the second was " Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child”, firstly published in 1935 and than re-edited in English and German for several times (see this book published in 2001 edited by deWaal).

In 1916 Robert M. Yerkes published an article in “Science” in which he called for the establishment of a primate research institute for the systematic study of the " fundamental instincts" and " social relations" of primates. In 1925 he bought a chimpanzee and a bonobo, Panzy and Chim, from a sailor in Boston and they became the first members of his fist non-human primate research laboratory in the United States, where Yerks acted as a director from 1929 until 1941. The Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology were eventually renamed the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre that now is located in Atlanta, Georgia.

Being a pupil of eminent behaviourists, Watson and Thorndike, Yerkes later accepted more holistic approach to study animal behaviour, close to gestalt ideas. He perhaps was predisposed to comparative investigations of intelligence in non- human primates by his work on human testing. Yerkes revised the Stanford-Binet Intelligence scales in 1915 to create a widely used point scale for the measurement of human mental ability. He was a principal figure in the development of human multiple choice testing. During World War I, Yerkes directed a team of 40 psychologists charged with assessing the abilities of army recruits for training, assignment, and discharge purposes. The methods they elaborated had a far-reaching effect on civilian life after the war. Yerks published fundamental books as “The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes” (1916), “The Great Apes” (1929) (coauthored with Ada Yerkes), and “Chimpanzees: A Laboratory Colony” (1943).

As early as in 1925 Yerkes suggested the idea to teach chimps sign language used by deaf people in order to make dialog between humans and non-humans possible. 40 years later, first series of experiments were performed by Allen and Beatrix Gardners and led to a very dramatic shift in ideas of Animal Intelligence. Indeed, gestalt psychologists adjusted efforts of researchers to address more and more complex phenomena and this has entailed in direct dialog with apes and other animals based on artificial intermediate languages (see Chapter 30).

 






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