Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world.
William James is considered to be the founder of functional psychology.
Functional psychology or functionalism refers to a psychological philosophy that considers mental life and behavior in terms of active adaptation to the person’s environment.
Ivan Pavlov is known primarily for his work in classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning refers to learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus is paired with a previously neutral stimulus. It refers to the learning process that results from this pairing, through which the neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response that is usually similar to the one elicited by the potent stimulus. Classical conditioning became the foundation of behaviorism.
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding behavior. It assumes that all behaviors are either reflexes produced by a response to certain stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual’s history, including especially reinforcement and punishment, together with the individual’s current motivational state and controlling stimuli.
So, although coming at it from different perspectives the work of both James and Pavlov has to do with the Gestalt or understanding the whys of how we come to acquire our perceptions of the world.
N’est-ce Pas?
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