HBC

Viki Solves Problems

The Gestalt psychologist Köhler posed several problems to chimpanzees. Here we see Viki solving one of these classic problems. The investigator suspends a food lure from a rope. The chimpanzee's task is simple: grab the food! But by raising the lure higher and higher, it quickly exceeds the reach of the chimpanzee, even when jumping. Köhler provided a set of boxes for his chimps to stand on. As the lure is raised, the chimps have to make a tower by putting one box on top of another. If the chimps are able to plan this behavior mentally, Köhler believed that was evidence for insightful problem solving. In contrast, if the chimp accidentally performs the correct actions without any evidence of a plan, then we would not have any evidence of true problem solving on the part of chimpanzees.

Cathy and Keith Hayes posed this famous set of problems to Viki. Initially, all Viki has to do is to move one box under the lure to reach it. But as it is raised higher and higher, she must stack the boxes into a tower to reach the lure.

Note that Viki has trouble with this solution at first. She tries to reach the lure by jumping from one box. Then she brings the second box over, sets it on the ground, and tries to jump from it, also to no avail. Then Viki tries a different tactic. She stands on the first box and throws the second box at the lure. Viki had experience with using a ball to knock down a lure, so this was an interesting attempt. Finally we see Viki creating a tower from two boxes. Viki quickly generalizes to a 3-box problem.