![]() Wolfgang Köhler was particularly interested in physics and natural sciences. Wertheimer realised that the perception of the whole (the group of figures in a sequence) was radically different from the perception of its components (each static image). Wertheimer, then at the Institute of Psychology in Frankfurt am Main, described in this article a visual illusion called apparent motion.Īpparent motion is the perception of movement that results from viewing a rapid sequence of static images, as happens in the movies or in flip books. The inaugural article of Gestalt Psychology was Max Wertheimer’s Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement, published in 1912. Therefore, to understand the subjective nature of human perception, we should transcend the specific parts to focus on the whole. It argues that the whole is grasped even before the brain perceives the individual parts – like when, looking at a photograph, we see the image of a face rather than a nose, two eyes and the shape of a chin. Gestalt, on the other hand, suggests the opposite path. Structuralists believed that complex perceptions could be understood by identifying the primitive sensations it caused – such as the points that make a square or particular pitches in a melody. This school of thought defended that mental processes should be broken down into its basic components, in order to focus on them individually. This idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts – the central tenet of Gestalt psychology – challenged the then prevailing theory of Structuralism. They theorized that, because of those “mental shortcuts”, the perception of the whole is different from the sum of individual elements. Similarly, the Gestalt researchers Wertheimer, Koffka and Kohler observed that the human brain tends to automatically organize and interpret visual data through grouping. Two of the main philosophical influences of Gestalt are Kantian epistemology and Husserl’s phenomenological method.īoth Kant and Husserls sought to understand human’s consciousness and perceptions of the world, arguing that those mental processes are not entirely mediated by rational thought (Jorge, 2010). That structure provides a scientific explanation for why changes in spacing, organization and timing can radically transform how information is received and assimilated. It makes a reference to the way individual components are structured by our perception as a psychical whole (Wulf, 1996). In a loose translation, the German word ‘Gestalt’ (pronounced “ge-shtalt”) means ‘configuration’, or ‘structure’. Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization.For that reason, the Gestalt Laws are appealing not only to psychologists but also to visual artists, educators and communicators.They offer a powerful framework to understand human perception, and yet are simple to assimilate and implement. ![]() The Gestalt Principles, or Laws of Perception, explain how this behavior of “pattern seeking” operates.Austrian and German psychologists started researching the human mind’s tendency to try to make sense of the world around us through automatic grouping and association. Gestalt grew from the field of psychology in the beginning of the 19th Century.For instance, when reading a text, a person perceives each word and sentence as a whole with meaning, rather than seeing individual letters and while each letterform is an independent individual unit, the greater meaning of the text depends on the arrangement of the letters into a specific configuration.It suggests that structures, perceived as a whole, have specific properties that are different from the sum of their individual parts. Gestalt psychology is a school of thought that seeks to understand how the human brain perceives experiences.
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