Psychology
WHERE/WHEN: At home at 3:46 pm on October 1, 2006.
OBSERVATION: My daughter was playing in the living room when she saw something in her playpen that she wanted. She started to get really frustrated and throwing a little tantrum that she could not reach it. After a few minutes she realized that if she brought over her little chair that was across the room, she could stand on it and reach into the playpen to get her toy.
PSYCHOLOGY-RELATED QUESTION: Would this be an example of insight learning?
PERTINENT CHAPTER: Chapter 6 (Learning)
ANSWER TO QUESTION: Based on the reading of Kohler’s Study of Insight, Kohler believed that there was a deeper process of learning than simple “trial and error”. It seemed from his experiments that we first study and think about the problem for a while and then “in a flash of insight” we understand the solution (Huffman, 2007, p. 228).
EXPERIMENT: My experiment will test whether children ages 2-3 use insight, or sudden understanding of problems, to find the solution. I will first randomly assign four children into two groups, two children in each group.
Group One: no instruction given in regards to the different materials provided (CONTROL).
Group Two: will be instructed to retrieve the ball in a playpen using the materials supplied (EXPERIMENTAL).
Both groups will be given the same materials (playpen with two balls inside and scattered chairs throughout the room) and the same amount of time to solve the problem (1 hour). After an hour we will observe and see how many children retrieved the ball from the playpen (DEPENDENT VARIABLE) with the use of the chairs (INDEPENDENT VARIABLE) in the room.
ALTERNATE FINDINGS: I would expect to find that the children would first study the problem and then later figure out that they could move the chairs to retrieve the balls from the playpen. If this were not the case and the children tried to...
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