Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [197]
Memory is an aspect of epistemology about which Gestalt psychology offered some particularly useful and illuminating ideas.
One was the hypothesis, presented in some detail by Koffka, that the physiological basis of memory is the formation of “traces” in the central nervous system—permanent neural changes induced by experience. It was an acute guess; decades later, neurophysiologists would begin to discover the actual cellular and molecular changes that constitute traces.
Another keen guess dealt with the psychological basis of memory. Previously laid-down memory traces, Koffka said, influence how new experiences are perceived and remembered. Unlike associationism, which said that new experiences are merely added to old ones, Koffka said that new experiences interact with traces, traces with new experience, in ways not available to the mind early in life, and that this interaction is the cause of mental development.39 His idea would be borne out by a wealth of observational data that the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget was even then gathering.
Koffka marshaled a mass of experimental evidence to show that memory is not a mere sticking-together or aggregation of experiences, as in association theory, but a weaving together by means of the meaningful connections. Among the evidence he adduced was that of Ebbinghaus and his followers, that it is much harder to learn a string of nonsense syllables than a series of words connected by meaning. Koffka gave a simple and persuasive example: If every connection between items were merely one of association, these two lines would be equally easy to learn:
pud sol dap rus mik nom
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
Koffka’s comment: “It is not easy for association theory to explain why the second line is learned and retained so much more easily than the first, a difficulty which, as far as I know, was never explicitly mentioned by the associationists.”40
Like much else about Gestalt psychology, the truth illustrated by those two lines seems so obvious that one wonders why it needed to be rediscovered. But psychology has not moved in a steady course from ignorance toward knowledge; its progress has been more like that of an explorer of an unknown land who tentatively advances toward a distant goal by this valley or that, this river or that, and often must pursue a roundabout route or double back on his tracks when the chosen route proves a poor one. The followers of Wundt and the behaviorists made important headway toward the remote goal but went off into dead ends; the Gestaltists put psychology back on a truer course.
Boring made this point with a different metaphor in his magisterial history of psychology: “It appears that orthodoxy had been led astray along the straight and narrow path of sensory analysis. It is the wide gate and the broad way of phenomenology that lead to life.”41 Although the Gestalt psychologists were not the first or the only ones to make this discovery, it was they who made it in a form so convincing that it was amalgamated into the structure of scientific psychology.
Failure and Success
In Germany, as we saw, Gestalt psychology became a leading school in the 1920s but virtually disappeared in the mid-thirties after its three founders and many of their former students left Germany.
In the United States, after the publication of Koffka’s introductory article in 1922, Gestalt psychology met at first with great interest and even enthusiasm.42 Koffka and Köhler were asked to give seminars and colloquia at nearly all the important American research centers; Köhler was a visiting professor at Clark University in 1925; and Harvard later offered him a visiting professorship, which he had to decline.
But behaviorism was even then rapidly becoming the ruling brand of psychology in America, and there was no room