Wolfgang Köhler (January 21st, 1887 - June 11th, 1967) is a German psychologist and one of the founders of the Psychologie of the form.

Biography

Wolfgang Köhler was born with Tallinn in Estonia German parents. Whereas it is six years old its family moves to settle in Germany. He studied at the universities of Tübingen, Bonn then of Berlin. In 1909 it finishes its thesis on the psycho-acoustic one under the direction of Carl Stumpf.

It continues its research on hearing at the university of Frankfurt where it meets max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, the two other founders of the Psychologie of the form. From 1913 to 1920 he becomes director of the research station on the anthropoïdes of the Prussian Académie of sciences to Tenerife in the archipelago of the the Canaries, where he is constrained to remain during the war. It is at that time that it highlights the phenomenon of sudden training ( insight ) in the large monkeys. In 1917, it describes this research in the book Intelligenzprüfungen year Anthropoiden . In 1920 it returns to Germany, and of 1920 to 1935, it teaches at the University of Berlin and becomes director of the Institute of psychology. It that he writes Gestalt Psychology , is at that time published in 1929.

With the come to power of the Nazi S he criticizes their racist policy openly then sees himself constrained to leave Germany in 1935 definitively. He then becomes professor with the Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania where he teaches until 1955. He spends then a year to Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton then becomes professor with Dartmouth College.

He received the first Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, organization of which he then became the president.

The phenomenon of Insight

detailed Article: Insight

One of the most known results of Köhler is its description of the phenomenon of insight in the Solution to problem at the Chimpanzé. Köhler describes how the animal stops after several unfruitful tests then seems to suddenly discover a new solution by the reorganization of the parts of the problem.

This analysis is frontally opposed to the idea Apprentissage by reinforcement preached by the behaviorists like a sufficient principle to give an account of the whole of the human or animal conduits. The existence of the insight indeed prevents from reducing the Solution to problem to the Conditionnement.

Psychophysical isomorphism

The theory of the psychophysical isomorphism of Köhler leaves the postulate that the fundamental structures of our phenomenologic world are compatible with purely physical laws of the organization. It radically renews the traditional thesis of the psychophysical parallelism (Ernst Mach, Ewald Hering, Georg E. Müller), thought like a simple methodological principle, by posing the conceptual unit of various fields of knowledge around the concept of organization dynamic.

For the psychologist of Gestalt, the forms appear in the reciprocal determination their parts and of their entour; and it is also, as such, of the configurations transposable through a plurality of situations. The forms are transposable because they are made dynamic physical relations suitable for be carried out in various fields (and from a certain point of view, the concept of isomorphism is a derivation of such a concept of transposability, radicalized for example by the possibility of conversion between space and temporal aspects of the structures). Thus an order tested in space must be found, but in an abstract direction , functional , and by no means naively topographic, in the analysis of the subjacent processes. It should be stressed that isomorphism köhlerien is initially an abstract isomorphism. It should be conceived in the mathematical direction term, starting from a community of structures between the topological theories and dynamic , directed towards a qualitative study of the structures, which will be invested in the description of the field of the experiment, and those, more quantitative, which will make it possible to determine the subjacent processes biophysics.

The psychophysical isomorphism of Köhler is thus “functional”, it relates to operating processes, processes built and analyzed mathematically, that one puts in connection with methods of the experiment. It does not imply any simple morphological identity: it is not enough to make rounds on the surface of the brain to be worth like corrélat of a perceived circle. It should be included/understood like topological, geometrical, dynamic, but with the abstract directions and multiples which mathematics gives in these terms, and not in a simply topographic direction, directly readable in the three-dimensional structure of the brain. (Cf V. Rosenthal and Y. - M. Visetti, Köhler . Paris, Beautiful Letters, 2003.)

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