Wolfgang Köhler

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Wolfgang Köhler (January 21, 1887, Reval (now Tallinn), Estonia – 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.

From 1913 to 1920 he worked at the Anthropoid Station at Tenerife in the Canary Islands. There he wrote his book Mentality of Apes. Köhler was interested in how chimpanzees solved problems like retrieving bananas suspended from the top of their enclosure. He found that they stood on boxes, and stacked boxes on top of each other, to get closer to the food. They were also able to use poles to knock the bananas from their hooks. He concluded that the chimps used insight to solve the problem, rather than the trial-and-error learning that Edward Thorndike asserted was the basis of all animal learning. It has been pointed out, however, that the chimps did have prior experience of the boxes and poles and it is difficult to be sure that some trial-and-error learning had not occurred before Köhler's tests.

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.

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[edit] External links

• Comprehensive Gestalt psychology website of the international Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications - GTA
• Short biography on Wertheimer et al.
• Wertheimer Biography at Swarthmore
• Memoir Wolfgang Köhler - Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center, Leipzig
• Biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science