Behaviorist psychologists had been influenced by Pavlov’s experiments and tended to study human behavior in terms of stimuli and responses. The German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, however, felt that this approach missed much. Kohler was a co-founder of the Gestalt movement. He spent several years as director of a research center in Tenerife observing a chimp colony.
Setting them tasks and observing the way in which they go about solving them, he observed that they do not utilize a straightforward approach of trial and error. Once an attempt fails, a chimp pauses and thinks before coming up with another strategy. If the answer works, it’s used again for similar problems, resulting in a process of learning through exploration. Köhler realized the chimp goes over the problem in its head, studying it mentally, perceiving meaning, and discovering new techniques.
