Gestalt Psychology

Another important reaction to structuralism was the development of gestalt psychology in

the early 1900s. Gestalt psychology emphasizes how perception is organized. Instead of
considering the individual parts that make up thinking, gestalt psychologists took the opposite
tack, studying how people consider individual elements together as units or wholes. Led by
German scientists such as Hermann Ebbinghaus and Max Wertheimer, gestalt psychologists
proposed that “The whole is different from the sum of its parts,” meaning that our perception, or
understanding, of objects is greater and more meaningful than the individual elements that make
up our perceptions. Gestalt psychologists have made substantial contributions to our
understanding of perception.

Principles of Gestalt Psychology:

The human brain is wired to see structure, logic, and patterns. It helps us make sense of
the world. In the 1920s a group of German psychologists developed theories around how people
perceive the world around them, called Gestalt principles.

Gestalt principles, or gestalt laws, are rules of the organization of perceptual scenes.
When we look at the world, we usually perceive complex scenes composed of many groups of
objects on some background, with the objects themselves consisting of parts, which may be
composed of smaller parts, etc. How do we accomplish such a remarkable perceptual
achievement, given that the visual input is, in a sense, just a spatial distribution of variously
colored individual points? The beginnings and the direction of an answer were provided by a
group of researchers early in the twentieth century, known as Gestalt psychologists. Gestalt is a
German word meaning 'shape' or 'form'. Gestalt principles aim to formulate the regularities
according to which the perceptual input is organized into unitary forms, also referred to as
(sub)wholes, groups, groupings, or Gestalten (the plural form of Gestalt). These principles
mainly apply to vision, but there are also analogous aspects in auditory and somatosensory
perception. In visual perception, such forms are the regions of the visual field whose portions are
perceived as grouped or joined together and are thus segregated from the rest of the visual field.
Common principles:

 Proximity
 Similarity
 Closure
 Continuity
 Good Form
 Figure and ground articulation
 Common fate principle

Resources on principles of gestalt:

 http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Gestalt_principles
 https://www.usertesting.com/blog/gestalt-principles
 https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/gestalt-principles-of-design#:~:text=There
%20are%20six%20individual%20principles,gestalt%2C%20such%20as%20common
%20fate.
 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wsu-sandbox/chapter/gestalt-principles-of-
perception/