Insight Learning

Insight learning is a form of learning in which the solution to a problem appears suddenly, as a reorganization of how the problem is perceived, rather than emerging gradually through repeated trial and error. The concept is most closely associated with the German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, who conducted influential experiments with chimpanzees on the island of Tenerife beginning in 1917, presenting the animals with problems that required using objects in new and unfamiliar ways, such as stacking boxes or joining sticks, to reach food that was otherwise out of reach. Kohler observed that after a period of apparent failure, an animal would often abruptly and purposefully perform the correct action, as though a solution had occurred to it all at once, a pattern he took as evidence of a distinct cognitive process rather than of learning built up gradually through repeated attempts. Insight, in this sense, is often described as a sudden aha moment in which a problem is genuinely restructured in the solver's mind, and the concept became a central piece of evidence for the Gestalt school of psychology's argument that some learning involves whole-problem perceptual reorganization rather than only incremental association.