eory the word “gestalt” means any segregated whole” (on-line). The key argument to Kohler is that the nature of the parts is determined by, and secondary to, the whole. Kohler underlined that one must examine the whole to discover what its natural parts are …what it consists of..its very makeup.Here we can begin to apply the concept of insight and perception. What is insight? In the strict sense of the word, it refers to the fact that, when we are aware of a relation, of any relation, this relation is not experienced as fact by itself, but rather as something that follows from the characteristics of the objects under consideration (on-line). Now, when primates try to solve a problem, their behavior often shows that they are aware of a certain important relation. But when they now make use of this “insight” and thus solve their problem, their perceptions begin to change.While marooned in the Canary Islands of the first World War, Kohler had access to a large outdoor pen and nine chimpanzees of various ages. The pen, described by Kohler as a playground, was provided with a variety of objects including boxes, poles, and sticks, with which the primates could experiment. Kohler constructed a variety of problems for the chimps, each of which involved obtaining food that was not directly accessible. In the simplest task, food was put on the other side of a barrier. Dogs and cats in previous experiments had faced the barrier in order to reach the food, rather than moving away from the goal to circumvent the barrier. The chimps, however, presented with an apparently analogous situation, set off immediately on an opposing and rewarding route to the food. In a typical sequence, a chimp jumps fruitlessly at bananas that have been hung out of reach. Usually, after a period of unsuccessful jumping, the chimp apparently becomes angry or frustrated, walks away in seeming disgust, pauses, then looks at th...
