The Mentality of Apes
Context

Before Köhler's work, the field of comparative psychology was revolutionised by Charles Darwin, proposing evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals. In the 19th century Darwin wrote about the possible reasoning abilities of animals. In the early 20th century, further influential research was among others published by Edward Thorndike, who investigated learning abilities of apes and other animals. The Thorndiken view explained animal intelligence with stimulus-response associations, limiting animal learning to trial and error learning. At the same time Robert Yerkes, studying animals' intelligence and Leonard Hobhouse, who described sudden problem-solving abilities in monkeys, opposed these proposals of Thorndike. Hobhouse's experimental results were in favour of apes being able to learn by imitation. Together with a broader shift in the perception of animal intelligence, these different researchers provided the base for Köhler's studies on anthropoid apes. Köhler conducted experiments similar to those of Hobhouse.
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