Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [191]
Köhler, after working with Wertheimer on the motion-illusion experiments, had stayed on at Frankfurt for another three years; then, at twenty-six, he was offered the post of director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences’ anthropoid research station on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession off the coast of northwest Africa. Köhler shipped out in 1913, never imagining that a world war and chaotic post-war conditions in Germany would trap him there for over six years.
But he put the time to good use. He had been profoundly impressed by Wertheimer’s ideas and, as he later recalled, “had a feeling that his work might transform psychology, which was hardly a fascinating affair at the time, into a most lively study of basic human issues.”19 During his years on Tenerife these ideas were often on his mind, and his primate studies, although not formally couched in Gestalt terms, strikingly confirmed Gestalt theory as applied to problem solving. He pursued the investigation, with numerous variations and replications, for a number of years. Several British intelligence agents were convinced that he was a German spy, since no scientist would have spent so much time studying how apes get hard-to-reach bananas.20
(Ronald Ley, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, recently spent nearly fifteen years trying to determine whether Köhler had been a spy. He gathered gossip and rumors from elderly Tenerifans, but neither on the island nor in Germany did he find any hard evidence bearing on the matter. Ley thinks Köhler may well have been a spy; other scholars doubt it.)
Köhler created a number of different problems for his apes to solve. The simplest were detour problems, in which the chimpanzees had to get to the bananas by a roundabout route; that gave them no trouble. More complicated were problems in which the chimpanzees had to use “tools” to reach bananas hanging out of reach—sticks with which they could knock them down, ladders they could lean against a wall (they never did figure out how to prop the ladders securely but always stood them sideways to the wall), and boxes.
Some of the chimpanzees took a long time to see that the boxes could be used to reach the bananas, and they never did use them well. Some would do ineffective things like piling up boxes where they happened to be rather than under the bananas, or stacking them so poorly that they toppled over when the chimpanzees tried to climb on them. Others, clearly smarter, did better, learning to stack boxes in a more secure fashion even when it took more than two boxes for them to reach the bananas. Grande, a female, actually was able, albeit with difficulty, to build a stack of four boxes when necessary.
Time and again, an ape would seem to suddenly see a solution at some juncture; Köhler interpreted this as a restructuring of the ape’s view of the situation. He called the sudden discovery “insight,” and defined it as “the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole layout of the problem,”21 obviously quite a different process from the trial-and-error learning of Thorndike’s cats.
Köhler thought the cats might have exhibited insight in a different kind of situation, but the puzzle box was a problem they could not solve through intelligence because it contained mechanical elements they could not see. But he did determine that insight thinking does not take place in simpler animals. He set up a fence at right angles to the wall of a house, with a segment at a right angle to its outer end, making an L. When he put a chicken inside the L and food outside, the chicken rushed back and forth along the fence, unable to recognize that by momentarily turning away from the food it could get around the end of the barrier. A dog, however, quickly sized up the situation and ran around to the food. A one-year-old girl, put inside the L and seeing her favorite doll on the other side, first tried to push through the fence but then laughed joyfully and toddled around the