Tolman took a different view, influenced by gestalt psychology, an important undercurrent in psychology during the mid-Twentieth-century which focused on how we perceive the world more or less instantaneously as a whole, rather than as components that have to be built up, bit by bit. Although he disliked the English translation, the famous phrase ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ derives from the German gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka.5 It would be fair to say that Tolman might have wondered if rats were gestaltists. Would frustrated maze-running rats, he speculated, perceive
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