Biography of Kurt Koffka (1886 - 1941)

"Kurt Koffka famous phrases"

There are great figures of psychology that create some fascination us. Such is the case of Kurt Koffka. What were your beginnings? How did your journey begin in the area of ​​the Cognitive Psychology? Maybe giving a review of your life helps us understand the legacy that left us.

Content

• The beginnings of Kurt Koffka's life
• The creation of the Gestalt School
• Contributions to education, learning and memory
  • Bibliography

The beginnings of Kurt Koffka's life

Koffka was born in 1886 in Berlin. As a new member of a wealthy family in which lawyer professionals predominated, it was expected that he also decided to study the law degree and continue with the family tradition. However, it was not.

He began studying philosophy at the University of Berlin. From his youth and after breaking with "the rules", we can get an idea of Your most groundbreaking character, Something that we will also see in the different theories and ideas that would end up developing in the future.

The university years pass and this is how He ends at doctorate only at 22 years of age. At the same time he lives in Edinburgh, learns English fluently and achieves a privileged position in Anglo -Saxon countries to promote their theories and expand their studies. Fruit of this stage, your thesis is born "Experimental investigations of the rhythm".

At that time, German elementary theories prevailed, and Koffka would spend the following years working in different environments and psychology laboratories that They questioned said elementarism. And his career had only started.

The creation of the Gestalt School

Together with Wertheimer and Köhler, in 1912 the Movement that began the Gestalt School began in 1912. It would no longer be until 1925 that it would move to the United States of America. There it was University Professor and Active Representative of the Gestalt Movement.

Thus, together with his partner Köhler, he participates in the conferences of Clark University, following the wake of figures like Freud. His most productive era took place between the two great wars, since he continued to exercise as a researcher and professor until his death in 1941, a year before World War II.

Without a doubt, along with their companions Wertheimer and Köhler, they formed a perfect team. In fact, each of them, with their achievements and contributions, underpinned a solid structure that led its theories and developments towards the success and recognition of the rest of the sector.

Based on an exhaustive empirical method, they did not stop working during all these years, and precisely Koffka is whom the most A great empirical work history is attributed. His most recognized works are "The growth of the mind " 1921, and "Principles of Gestaltic Psychology", of 1935.

Contributions to education, learning and memory

So many years of research and study through the psychology of Gestalt had their repercussions on the way of seeing pedagogy, memory and the way we learn. According to Koffka, children organize their first experiences in "all", to differentiate them and organize them as they grow and mature.

He was also a firm defender of the idea that We learn understanding the situations that happen to us. Is evident in his work "The growth of the mind". This is how it is clearly positioned against theories that defend learning by essay and error.

In this way, Koffka's research and theories would mold the American education system. Finally, they began to focus on teaching and learning through understanding, and not merely based on the memorization of concepts and processes.

Supported by the rest of your team and students, work on the visual perception, becoming the main line of research that would give more notoriety at the birth of the gestalt movement. Thanks to teamwork, they took a lot of material forward.

According to the perceptual constancy defended by Koffka, humans can perceive the qualities of objects through our visual perception and understand that it is the same object, although the conditions of lighting, distance and perspective change immediately or substantially.

These ideas are linked to their traces theory, which argues that each experience experienced causes some activity in our brain, leaving a Memory trace which will last in time, even after that event is finished. Every time an related experience is lived again, our memory will resort to that trace.

Without a doubt, this is one of its innumerable contributions to the world of psychology, based on cognitivism and with a close relationship with constructivism, theories that today have emerged more strongly than ever as elements of improvement of education.

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Bibliography

• Koffka, k. (1936). Principles of Psychology of form. Institute of Scientific Publications.
• Morfín, e. R. (1994). Kurt Koffka: A pioneer of Gestalt's psychology. Autonomous University of Nuevo León.
• Wertheimer, m. (1924). Perceptual organization laws. Psychology Magazine, 2 (6), 433-465.
• García-Galindo, j. AND. (2003). Gestalt's theory: a proposal for psychological research in Mexico. National Autonomous University of Mexico.
• German, a. (2009). The perception of movement in gestalt theory. Iztacala Psychology Electronic Magazine, 12 (2), 1-20.
• López, l. F., & Peláez, M. TO. (2014). Kurt Koffka's work and the perception of form. Advances in Latin American Psychology, 32 (2), 345-359.