GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY Topics A Brief History of Gestalt Psychology Gestalt psychology Major Contributors Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization Gestalt ◦ The word ''gestalt'' means the ''unified or meaningful whole.'' ◦ It looks at the human mind and behavior as a whole. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”—that is, our perception, or understanding, of objects is greater and more meaningful than the individual elements that make up our perceptions. A Brief History of Gestalt Psychology ◦ At approximately the same time the behaviorist revolution was gathering strength in the United States, the Gestalt revolution was taking hold in Germany. ◦ Gestalt psychologists’ movement against Wundt’s position paralleled the rise of behaviorism in the United States, they were independent of one another. ◦ Gestalt psychology focused primarily on the sensory nature of Wundt’s work. ◦ Watson’s behaviorism was beginning its attack on Wundt and Titchener as well as on functionalism. ◦ Gestalt psychologists accepted the value of consciousness while criticizing the attempt to reduce it to atoms or elements. ◦ Behavioral psychologists refused to acknowledge the usefulness of the concept of consciousness for a scientific psychology. Phi-Phenomenon ◦ A significant influence on the development of Gestalt psychology was the Zeitgeist, especially the intellectual climate in physics. ◦ Phi phenomenon: The illusion that two stationary flashing lights are moving from one place to another. ◦ These findings may seem unremarkable to you. Scientists had been aware of the phenomenon for years, and movies, or motion pictures, had at that time already been popular. Major Contributors ◦ Max Wertheimer ◦ Kurt Koffka ◦ Wolfgang Kohler CONTRIBUTION: The publication of Static and Stationary Physical Gestalts (1920), a book that won considerable praise for its high level of scholarship. Theory Development: ◦ In the 1920s, German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler was studying the behavior of apes. He designed some simple experiments that led to the development of one of the first cognitive theories of learning, which he called insight learning. Insight learning is among various methods of Behavioral learning process, which is a fundamental aspect of Behavioral Psychology. ◦ In 1956 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA, and in 1959 he was elected president of the APA. Wolfgang Köhler observed chimpanzees as they solved problems. Köhler’s most famous subject was a chimp named Sultan. The psychologist gave Sultan two sticks of different sizes and placed a banana outside of Sultan’s cage. He watched as Sultan looked at the sticks and tried to reach for the banana with no success. Eventually, Sultan gave up and got distracted. But it was during this time that Köhler noticed Sultan having an “epiphany.” The chimp went back to the sticks, placed one inside of the other, and used this to bring the banana to him. Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization ◦ Gestalt’s principles, or Laws of Perception, were theorized by Wertheimer in an article published in 1923, and further elaborated by Köhler, Koffka and Metzger. ◦ The principles are grounded on the human natural tendency of finding order in disorder – a process that happens in the brain, not in the sensory organs such as the eye. According to Wertheimer, the mind “makes sense” of stimulus captured by the eyes following a predictable set of principles. The four main laws of organization are: 1.Similarity 2.Proximity 3.Continuity 4.Closure 5.Figure/ground Similarity ◦ Similarity refers to our tendency to group things together based upon how similar to each other they are. ◦ In the diagram below we see row of red and black dots. The rows are grouped according to similar color. Proximity ◦ Proximity refers to our tendency to group things together based on how close they are to each other. ◦ The dots are grouped together based on how close they are to each other. Continuity ◦ Continuity refers to our tendency to see patterns and therefore perceive things as belonging together if they form some type of continuous pattern. ◦ In the figure the dots look like an “X” as we see the upper left side as continuing all the way to the lower left all the way to the upper right. Closure ◦ Closure refers to our tendency to complete familiar objects that have gaps in them. ◦ In the figure we perceive a circle, square, triangle etc. Figure/ground. ◦ According to Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin (1886– 1951), the most basic type of perception is the division of the perceptual field into two parts: the figure, which is clear and unified and is the object of attention, and the ground, which is diffuse and consists of everything that is not being attended to. ◦ Such a division creates what is called a figure– ground relationship.
