GESTALT PSYCHOLOGYY

1. Gestalt Revolt
● Around the time when Behaviorism was gaining momentum in the US, Gestalt psychology was taking
command over German Psychology but the two differed significantly. It also brought about fundamental
changes in American psychology
● It emerged in protest against Wundtian Psychology - Gestalt psychology focused primarily on the
elementistic nature of Wundt’s work and made this the target of their opposition.
● It called Wundt’s approach brick-and-mortar psychology sensations and feelings combined together
through associationism - Eg. When we enter a room, we look at actual walls, furniture, décor instead of
some sensory elements like shades and brightness that somehow combine to form the perception of
these objects.
Köhler wrote: We were excited by what we found, and even more by the prospect of finding further revealing facts. It was not only the
stimulating newness of our enterprise which inspired us. There was also a great wave of relief—as though we were escaping from a
prison. The prison was psychology as taught at the universities when we still were students. (Köhler, 1959, p. 728)

2. Early Influences
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● Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) suggested that anything is viewed in terms of its elements but unlike what the
associationists believed, Kant believed that these elements are organized meaningfully and not through
some mechanical process of association. Thus, a whole experience is created by the mind while perceiving
stimuli.
● Franz Brentano opposed Wundt’s focus on elements of consciousness and rather focused on the act of
experiencing as it occurred.
● Ernst Mach (1838–1916), a physics professor argued that our perception of an object does not change, even
if we change our orientation to it. Eg. A circle retains its elemental sensation of circularity even if the size is
changed or the color is changed.
● James regarded elements of consciousness as artificial abstractions. He stated that people see objects as
wholes, not as bundles of sensations.
● Phenomenology, a doctrine based on an unbiased description of immediate experience just as it occurs also
influenced Gestalt Psychology. The experience is not analyzed or reduced to elements or otherwise artificially
abstracted.

3. Fields of Force
• The changing zeitgeist in physics influenced the Gestalt approach immensely.
• In physics, with the recognition and acceptance of fields of force, the focus from atomistic approach
started shifting
• Fields of force are regions or spaces traversed by lines of force, such as of a magnet or electric current.
• These force fields were considered new structural entities, not summations of the effects of individual elements or
particles.
• Physicists were describing fields and organic wholes, thus providing ammunition and support for the Gestalt
psychologists’ revolutionary ways of looking at perception.

4. Phi-phenomenon – The experiment

5. PSYCHOLOGISTS
 6. Perceptual Constancy

A quality of wholeness or completeness in perceptual experience that does not vary even when the sensory elements
change. / the phenomenon in which an object or its properties (e.g., size, shape, color) appear unchanged
despite variations in the stimulus itself or in the external conditions of observation, such as object
orientation or level of illumination. Examples of perceptual constancy include brightness constancy, color
constancy, shape constancy, and size constancy.

• Similar to the apparent movement the perceptual experience has a quality of wholeness or completeness that is
not to be found in any of the component parts.
• The perception cannot be explained simply as a collection of elements or the sum of the parts. The perception is a
whole, a Gestalt, and any attempt to analyze or reduce it to elements will destroy it
Example: For example, when we stand in front of a window, a rectangular image is projected onto the retina of the
eye, but when we stand to one side, the retinal image becomes a trapezoid, although of course we continue to
perceive the window as a rectangle. Our perception of the window remains constant, even though the sensory data
(the images projected on the retina) change.
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7. Gestalt Principles of Perceptual Organization

• 1923: Wertheimer published these principles in a paper

• Gestalt principles are primarily the rules by which we organize our perceptual world
• Perceptual organization occurs as soon as various shapes or patterns are sensed
• The discrete parts of the perceptual field connect, uniting to form structures distinct from
their background.
• According to Gestalt theory, the brain is a dynamic system in which all elements
active at a given time interact. Those which are similar or close together tend to combine,
and elements that are dissimilar or farther apart tend not to combine.
• Wertheimer’s principles of organization contribute to the law of Prägnanz
• According to this law, perceptual organization tends to be as good as possible under
prevailing conditions.
• This enables us to see our world in as orderly, coherent, and economical a way as
conditions permit
 8. Insight: Gestalt Study of Learning
Experiments with apes-
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.In this experiment, Kohler hung a piece of fruit just out of reach of each chimp. He then provided the chimps with either two sticks or three boxes, then waited and watched. Kohler noticed that after the
chimps realized they could not simply reach or jump up to retrieve the fruit, they stopped, had a seat, and thought about how they might solve the problem. Then after a few moments, the chimps stood up and proceeded to
solve the problem.In the first scenario, the problem was solved by placing the smaller sticks into the longer stick to create one very long stick that could be used to knock down the hanging fruit. In the second scenario, the
chimps would solve the problem by stacking the boxes on top of each other, which allowed them to climb up to the top of the stack of boxes and reach the fruit.Learning occurs in a variety of ways. Sometimes it is the result of
direct observation; other times, it is the result of experience through personal interactions with the environment. Kohler called this newly observed type of learning insight learning.

• Insight: The apparently spontaneous apprehension or understanding of relationships

• According to Kohler, “There is no underlying conditioning taking place, rather, from a certain point on, the
animal realizes what it is all about, and from this moment on the resultant behavior is of course perfect” (quoted
in Ley, 1990, p. 182).
• Köhler believed that the insight and problem-solving abilities demonstrated by his chimps differed from the
trial-and-error learning described by Thorndike.
• Köhler criticized Thorndike’s work, arguing that its experimental conditions were artificial and allowed the
research animals to display only random behaviors.
9. Productive Thinking in Humans
Wertheimer in his book ‘Productive Thinking’(1945) wrote that thinking is done in terms of wholes.
• In trial-and-error method, a solution to a problem is hidden, in a sense, and the learner may make mistakes
before hitting on the correct answer.
• He believed problem solving should proceed from the whole problem downward to the parts, not the reverse.
• He challenged traditional educational practices, such as mechanical drill and rote learning, which derive from
the associationist approach to learning.
 • He found repetition to be rarely productive and cited as evidence a student’s inability to solve a variation of a
problem when the solution had been learned by rote rather than grasped by insight.
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10. Isomorphism

Kohler(1929/47) defined it as “experienced order in space is always structurally identical with a

functional order in the distribution of underlying brain processes” The gestalt perspective on mind and
brain has been called isomorphism.
It was developed as a theory about underlying neurological correlates of perceived Gestalts to further
understand the brain mechanisms involved in perception.
• The cerebral cortex was depicted as a dynamic system, in which the elements active at a given time
interact. This concept lies in contrast with the principles of association.
• Wertheimer, on the basis of his theory on apparent motion, suggested that brain activity is a
configural, whole process. Because apparent motion and actual motion are experienced identically, the
cortical processes for apparent and actual motion must be similar. It follows that corresponding brain
processes must be operating.
• To account for the phi phenomenon, there must be a correspondence between the psychological or
conscious experience and the underlying brain experience. This idea is called isomorphism
It refers to the structural correspondence between the experience and underlying brain processes. The
ordered nature of an experience doesn’t lie in isolation but corresponds to ordered distribution of
cortical events.

11. Spread of Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology was not easily accepted in the United States for several reasons:
1) behaviorism was at the peak of its popularity.
2) There was the language barrier. The major Gestalt publications were in German, and the need for
translation delayed full and accurate dissemination of the Gestalt viewpoint.
3) Many psychologists incorrectly believed Gestalt psychology dealt only with perception.
4) Forced retirement by the Nazi Govt run by Hitler to replace ‘jewish science’ with Aryan science’.
The founders Wertheimer, Kofka, and Köhler settled at small colleges in the United
States that did not have graduate programs, so it was difficult for them to attract
disciples to carry on their ideas.
5) American psychology had advanced far beyond the ideas of Wundt and Titchener,
which the Gestalt psychologists were opposing. Behaviorism was already the second
stage of American opposition.
However it’s importance was felt in these 3 ways:

a. It provided a systematic approach to other sub-disciplinary areas like social psychology

personality etc. it found its concept and researches in the mainstream psychological books. its
research findings also served as a powerful stimulus for other systems.
 12. Motivation and the Zeigarnik Effect

13. Criticisms of Gestalt Psychology

1. Critics of the Gestalt psychology school of thought charged that the organization of
perceptual processes, as in the phi phenomenon, was not approached as a scientific
problem to be investigated but treated instead as a phenomenon whose existence was
simply accepted. This was like denying there was a problem at all.

2. Experimental psychologists asserted that the Gestalt position was vague and that basic
concepts were not defined with sufficient rigor to be scientifically meaningful. Gestalt psychologists
countered these charges by insisting that in a young science,
attempts at explanation and definition may be incomplete, but being incomplete was
not the same as being vague.

3. Gestalt proponents were too occupied with theory at the expense of research and empirical
data. Additionally, Gestalt experimental work was inferior to behavioral psychology research
because it lacked adequate controls and its unquantified data were not amenable to
statistical analysis.

4. Köhler’s notion of insight has also been questioned. Attempts were made to
replicate the two-stick experiment which did not give any conclusive findings related
to insight.
5. Later studies suggested that problem solving does not occur suddenly and may
depend on prior learning or experience (see, for example, Windholz & Lamal,
1985).

Some psychologists considered Gestalt psychologists to be using poorly defined physiological assumptions.
6. Gestalt researchers admitted that their theorizing in this area was tentative but
believed their speculations were a useful adjunct to their system.

14. Contributions of Gestalt Psychology

● The Gestalt movement left an indelible imprint on psychology and influenced work on perception,
learning, thinking, personality, social psychology, and motivation.
● Unlike Behaviorism— Gestalt psychology retained a separate identity. Its major tenets were not fully
absorbed into mainstream psychological thought. It continued to foster interest in conscious
experience as a legitimate problem for psychology during the years when behaviorism was
dominant.
● The Gestalt focus on conscious experience was not like the approach of Wundt and Titchener but
centered instead on a modern version of phenomenology.
● Contemporary adherents of the Gestalt position believe that conscious experience does occur and is
a legitimate subject for study. They recognize, however, that it cannot be investigated with the same
precision and objectivity as overt behavior.
● A phenomenological approach to psychology is more widely accepted by European psychologists
than it is in the United States. Many aspects of contemporary cognitive psychology also owe their
origins to Gestalt psychology.