Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Kurt Koffka


Kurt Koffka (1886-1941) is considered as one of the founders of Gestalt Psychology, along with Wertheimer and Kohler. Koffka is most duly noted for his application of Gestalt theory to the psychology of learning, in particular his hypothesis on the way in which learning occurs for infants. Koffka hypothesized that from birth infants perceive reality as a whole, and as they mature infants gradually gain the ability to distinguish between objects. So, as opposed to the learning process of an infant being the gradual introduction of new elements into a perceptual framework (as would be posited by other learning theories), gestalt learning theory views the learning process as a gradual process of distinguishing between different elements of an already apparent whole.

Koffka's early work was based mostly in perception, as was the vast majority of early gestalt psychological study, particularly in the perception of equals. The assumption at the time was that two equal phenomena would be perceived as equal, for instance two equal length straight lines would be perceived as the same length. However using tools such as the Muller-Lyer illusion Koffka was able to demonstrate that this simply was not the case.



Koffka's application of gestalt theory to fields outside of the study of perception, namely to learning/developmental psychology, served to prove that gestalt theory was fair more versatile than simply a descriptive perceptorary science. This opened the door for gestalt theory to be applied to any number of different psychological, philosophical, sociological, and scientific fields.

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