To understand how we experience insight, it’s helpful to look at how we solve problems. They used reasoning or cognitive trial-and-error (as opposed to behaviorism’s behavioral trial-and-error) to arrive at the solution. The apes didn’t learn to solve the problems purely by association or feedback from the environment. Gestalt psychologists called it insight learning. Some other cognitive process was going on. To reach a bunch of bananas hanging high from the ceiling, they placed crates that were lying around on top of each other.Ĭlearly, in these experiments, the animals didn’t solve their problems with associative learning. Given their interest in perception (a cognitive process), Gestalt psychologists were interested in the role cognition could play in learning.Īlong came Kohler, who observed that apes, after they couldn’t solve a problem for a while, had sudden insights and seemed to figure out the solution.įor example, to reach bananas that were out of their reach, the apes joined two sticks together in a moment of insight. Instead of focusing on the parts, they were interested in the sum of the parts, the whole. They were inspired by optical illusions such as the reversible cube shown below, which can be perceived in two ways. Gestalt psychologists, on the other hand, were fascinated by how the brain could perceive the same thing in different ways.
There’s no mental work involved except association. In Thorndike’s, Pavlov’s, Watson’s, and Skinner’s experiments, the subjects learn things purely from their environments. In other words, the number of trials required by the animals to solve the problem decreased over time.īehavioral psychologists are infamous for not paying any attention to cognitive processes. The animal associated the movement of the right lever with the opening of the door.Īs Thorndike repeated the experiments, the animals got better and better at figuring out the right lever. The animals randomly moved levers before they figured out which one opened the door. To get out of the box, the animals had to hit the right lever. Their work was largely based on Thorndike’s experiments, where he put animals in a puzzle box with many levers on the inside. Associative learning vs Insight learningīehavioural psychologists in the mid-twentieth century had come up with good theories of how we learn by association.
We’ll look at how we learn, how we solve problems, and how insight fits into the picture of problem-solving.
In this article, we’ll explore what’s behind those “a-ha” moments. It’s believed that insight learning has been behind many creative inventions, discoveries, and solutions throughout history. It’s those “a-ha” moments, the light bulbs that people typically get long after they’ve abandoned a problem. Insight learning is a type of learning that happens suddenly, in the flash of a moment.
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