The Gestalt Revolt

 Wundt’s study about conscious experience has brought new school of thoughts such as
structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism

 While behaviorism is very strong in the United States and is protesting about
structuralism and functionalism, another school of thought has emerged in Germany
which the focus of the protest is against Wundt’s psychology, and this is the Gestalt
Revolution

 Both school of thought attacks these previous school of thoughts, while behaviorism is
protesting about the previous school of thought about their study of consciousness

 Gestaltists focused their attacks on Wundt’s elementism. The conscious experience

cannot be reduced to elements as it will distort the true meaning of that experience

 Gestaltists acknowledge introspection in studying the conscious experience but the

method the type of conscious experience that Wundt and structuralism studied is
artificial

 We experienced things in meaningful, intact configurations and not in isolated pieces.

We see not the colors or the brightness, but we see people, cars, trees, clouds

 And these meaningful, intact configurations are what we call, “Gestalt” which is the
basis of Gestalt psychology

 Gestalt psychologists are opposed to any type of elementism, like the sensations and
feelings on Wundt, stimulus response on Behaviorism

 Molar should be the approach in studying the conscious experience and not molecular
in which Wundt and the structuralism used in their study

 When we use molar approach in studying conscious experience, it means concentrating

on the phenomenological experience that is the mental experience that occurs without
further analysis

Antecedents of Gestalt Psychology

 As with other schools of thought, the Gestalt protest had its early influence by these
people and ideas

 Immanuel Kant- we all know that he is one of philosophers under nativism which states
that our mind is independent of experience.
  There is something in our minds that adds to our conscious experience that our
sensation does not contain.

 There is an importance difference in sensing and perceiving. Our minds is making our
sensory experience more structured and organized and more meaningful

 The way we perceive things is never the same as the world we sense

Ernst Mach

 Our perception does not change, even though we change our orientation to it

 Even if we look at different angles, we can still perceive the object at it is. If we look on a
table at different angles, we can still perceive that is a table

 Space form- Even if I present different types of circles, big or small, with or without
color, we can still perceive that as a circle, the experience of circleness is an example of
space form

 Time form- a tune remains the same in our perception even though it is played faster or
slower

Christian Von Ehrenfels

 The big contributor for three Gestalt psychologist

 No matter what pattern dots are arranged, we can still perceive the pattern and not the
individual dots

 Form is something that emerges from the elements of sensation

William James

 Part of functionalism and against elementism in psychology

 He stated that we perceive objects in whole and not as bundles of sensations and
feelings

Act Psychology

 They were also against on studying mental elements and the focus should be the mental
phenomena of experiencing
  This approach is called phenomenology which is the description of immediate
experience as it occurs without analysis

 This approach was used as the method of Gestalt psychologist

Development in Physics

 One of the Gestalt founders studied under modern physicist

 While in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the intellectual climate was
becoming less atomistic, and their focus was on fields of force and organic wholes

 Magnetism, when we try put iron filings on a sheet of paper with the magnet under, the
iron filings will arrange themselves in pattern

 Because physics had difficulty explaining that property, now because of the fields of
force they were able to support the Gestalt psychologist view on perception

The Founding of Gestalt Psychology

 While riding on a train through Germany during his vacation, Wertheimer got an idea for an experiment
 Wertheimer got an idea for an experiment about seeing motion when no actual motion occurred.
Abandoning his travel plans, he left the train at Frankfurt, purchased a toy stroboscope, and verified his
insight in a preliminary way in his hotel room
 Using the tachistoscope, he projected light through two slits, one vertical and the other 20 or 30 degrees
from the vertical.
 He played with the time interval with the two list and he found out that when the time interval is about 60
milliseconds, the subjects saw a single line of light that appeared to be moving from one slit to the other
and back again
 Example would be the one I am showing, the one where I am pointing, we can see there
is like a movement but there is no actual movement because they are just dots

 We cannot explain the apparent movement in molecular approach because it cannot be

broken down because they are just two stationary slits of light

 If we apply the approach of Wundt’s introspection, we can say that it is just two
successive lights but how we do explain the experience of movement that a single
motion is happening?

 This is where Wertheimer made his point, that this cannot be broken down