Kurt Koffka: biography of this Gestalt psychologist

The German Psychologist Kurt koffka is widely known for helping, along with Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, lay the foundations of the Gestalt school, which in retrospect would be a fundamental antecedent for the cognitive psychology modern as we understand it.

We briefly review his trajectory and contributions to the history of psychology, paying special attention to his figure in the genesis of the movement. Gestalt, inseparable from the other two companions of his but with their own personality, and the importance that this acquired in the face of the reductionism in force in the epoch.

Kurt Koffka Biography

Koffka was born in Berlin in 1886, into a wealthy family known for being a long line of lawyers and legal scholars. From a young age, Koffka breaks with the traditional and, instead of opting for a law degree, he studies Philosophy at the University of Berlin.

Koffka feels that he belongs to this field and ends up obtaining his doctorate in 1908. His thesis, entitled "Experimental Investigations of Rhythm", is carried out under the tutelage of Carl Stumpf, an important representative of phenomenological psychology. During this time he lives in Edinburgh, which allows him to perfect his English and gain an advantageous position. with respect to his companions in order to introduce his theories in English-speaking countries before no one.

After working in different psychology laboratories that question the dominant German elementarism, Koffka travels to Frankfurt and Main where he partners with Köhler and a newcomer Wertheimer with thousands of ideas about perception that could be tested in numerous experiments. These works would bear their first fruit in 1912, when Wertheimer published an article on the perception of movement that gave birth to the movement that constitutes the Gestalt school.

Several years later, after the First World War, he moved to the United States as a university professor and participated, together with Köhler in 1925, as representative of the Gestalt movement at the Clark University conferences, conferences in which many figures had also participated years ago. What Freud Y Jung.

Koffka remained active as a university professor, researcher, and writer until the last of his days in 1941.

Koffka's contribution from the Gestalt

It is impossible to talk about Koffka's contribution without taking into account the unique collaboration that the Gestalt movement brought forth. The three names originally associated with it form an indissoluble triumvirate and, to some extent, it is difficult to attribute particular aspects of the theory to each.

However, each of the three played a different role in the group and made his own contribution, always from a common base and respect for the work of the other two.

In the context of a Gestalt psychology that breaks with reductionism, he postulated that if the psychology was a science so it should be able to reduce phenomena to elements constituents, Koffka is credited with a large body of empirical work.

Probably his most famous contribution is the systematic application of Gestalt principles in his two best-known works: The Growth of the Mind (1921) and Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935).

The child mind

In The Growth of the Mind, Koffka argues that early childhood experiences are organized as "all," rather than the chaotic confusion of stimuli that according to William James newborns perceive. As they get older, Koffka says, children learn to perceive stimuli in a more structured and differentiated way, rather than as a "whole."

Koffka devotes much of this book to arguing against trial-and-error learning. He, through Köhler's investigations, defends the insight. That is true learning occurs through understanding the situation and its constituent elements, not to find the solution of a problem by pure chance. This revolutionary concept contributed greatly to the shift of the American pedagogical approach from rote learning to comprehension learning.

Perception and memory

In Principles of Gestalt Psychology, Koffka continues with the line of research from which the Gestalt movement was originally born: visual perception. In addition, he brings together the enormous amount of work carried out by the members of the gestalt group and their students and delves into topics such as learning and memory.

Koffka gives great importance to the work on perceptual constancy, through which humans are capable of perceive the properties of an object as constant, even though conditions such as perspective, distance, or lighting change.

Speaking of learning and memory, Koffka proposes a theory of traces. He assumes that each physical event experienced triggers a specific activity in the brain, which leaves a memory trace in the nervous system even though the stimulus is no longer present.

Once the memory trace is formed, all subsequent related experiences will involve an interaction between the memory process and the memory trace. This circularity where the old traces affect the new processes is reminiscent of the theories of Piaget, which together with Lev vygotsky they would become the foundation of constructivism.

Likewise, following this theory also explains forgetting. It gives a very important role to the availability of the traces, an idea that is surprising due to the similarity with the explanations that we have today about memory.

It is undeniable that Koffka, as an individual and as the founder of Gestalt, is a fundamental pillar of modern psychology.. Through both cognitivism and constructivism, we see his legacy reflected.