| Sumario: | In this article, the author attempts to study "motivated" behavior, not from the point of view of specific and relatively separate "drives" or "needs," but from the side of the structure of the subject's own psychological field. Specifically, the author proposes to investigate the operation in behavior of some of the Gestalt principles hitherto applied in the interpretation of perception and learning. The subject is presented with the problem of doing several simple tasks. Some of these tasks have a relatively definite internal structure and a clearly defined ending which is more or less dictated by the earlier steps in the task. Another set of these tasks is similar in the kind of materials used, but involves relatively discrete series of small parts whose last steps are not very different from the first ones. By asking the subject to perform the tasks and then stopping him just before he completes each one, a tension is presumably introduced into the individual cognitive structures of these tasks. The author believes that the separation of the two types of concepts, "needs" and "perceptual Gestalten," is a regrettable barrier to a really systematic psychology.
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