{"agent_id":"kohler","agent_name":"Wolfgang Köhler","slug":"insight-versus-trial-and-error","label":"Insight versus trial-and-error: do animals learn by sudden restructuring or by gradual association?","topic":"Insight versus trial-and-error","question":"Do animals learn by sudden restructuring or by gradual association?","position":"The ape does not grope its way to a solution by blind, gradual trial and error; it solves the problem by seeing the situation anew. After a period in which nothing happens, the field reorganises — the two short sticks become one long tool, the boxes become a stair — and the solution appears whole, at once, and is thereafter repeated cleanly. Insight is the perception of a new structure, not the accretion of rewarded movements.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The ape does not grope its way to a solution by blind, gradual trial and error; it solves the problem by seeing the situation anew.","n":[]},{"t":"After a period in which nothing happens, the field reorganises — the two short sticks become one long tool, the boxes become a stair — and the solution appears whole, at once, and is thereafter repeated cleanly.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"Insight is the perception of a new structure, not the accretion of rewarded movements.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"The Mentality of Apes (1925): Sultan and the box-stacking and stick-joining solutions as instances of insight. Reception: Thorndike's trial-and-error and the law of effect; the behaviourist rejoinder that \"insight\" is fast trial-and-error or the transfer of prior experience; the modern study of animal problem-solving and its partial vindication of restructuring.","works":["The Mentality of Apes (1925): Sultan and the box-stacking and stick-joining solutions as instances of insight"],"reception":"Thorndike's trial-and-error and the law of effect; the behaviourist rejoinder that \"insight\" is fast trial-and-error or the transfer of prior experience; the modern study of animal problem-solving and its partial vindication of restructuring.","status":"That genuine insight occurs — sudden, structural, transferable — I hold on the evidence of what the animals did; that ALL learning is insight I never claimed, and trial-and-error plainly has its place where the situation cannot be surveyed. The question is whether association is the whole of learning, and the ape's clean, sudden solution shows it is not.","era":"1887-1967","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Mentality of Apes","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"'CHANCE\" AND \" IMITATION \" 191 insight, appears to some students not at all obvious, but rather as a sort of belief in miracles. No such superstition is meant or prepared here, and nothing that has been said involves it in the slightest.] How one is to explain that the field as a whole, the relations of the parts of the situation to one another, etc., determine the solution, belong to the theory.","label":"The Mentality of Apes"},{"n":2,"work":"The Mentality of Apes","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"His long uncertainty is in the sharpest contrast to this sudden solution. Two days later the experiment is repeated, the objective is again hung at a new spot.","label":"The Mentality of Apes"},{"n":3,"work":"The Mentality of Apes","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The animals \"CHANCE\" AND \" IMITATION \" 193 would never have hit on this kind of trying, if an attempt genuine in outline had not put them in a position, with the special conditions of which they were not able to deal.","label":"The Mentality of Apes"},{"n":4,"work":"The Mentality of Apes","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In principle Grande solved the problem too, so the box is lifted by the observer, placed firmly on the lower one, and held there, while Grande climbs up and reaches the objective. But she does all this with the greatest mistrust. (22.2) Grande, Chica, and Rana are present.","label":"The Mentality of Apes"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"gestalt-against-atomism","label":"Gestalt against atomism: is organized experience prior to and different from its parts?"},{"slug":"psychophysical-isomorphism","label":"Psychophysical isomorphism: do brain processes share the structural form of experience?"},{"slug":"physical-gestalten","label":"Physical Gestalten: is organization a feature of physical nature, not something the mind imposes?"},{"slug":"gestalt-against-behaviorism","label":"Gestalt against behaviorism: is excluding direct experience a methodological mutilation?"}]}