Wolfgang Köhler

German-American psychologist and one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, best known for directing the Prussian Academy of Sciences' Anthropoid Station on Tenerife from 1913 to 1917, where he studied how chimpanzees solved problems such as reaching food placed out of direct reach. Publishing his findings as Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen (The Mentality of Apes, 1917), Köhler argued the apes' sudden, complete solutions demonstrated insight learning rather than the gradual trial-and-error shaping Edward Thorndike had described, a direct challenge to behaviorist accounts of learning. He later emigrated to the United States, taught at Swarthmore College, and became a leading critic of behaviorism from within experimental psychology.