Gestalt Flashcards
The Gestalt school of thought by giving an examples
The word Gestalt in German, actually means unified form of a whole shape. Gestalt school of though was based on the study of the laws of perception, in an attempt to discover the organization of cognitive processes.
The task of perception is to recognize objects according to the organization of their elements. They claimed that the whole is not just the simple sum of its parts but it is greater than its parts. Visual elements can combine in different ways and take different forms.
Gestalt psychology study the laws of grouping, they use those principles to determine how the human brain perceive environment and things. These laws account for the fact that the human brain naturally perceive objects in an organized pattern.
The adjacency/ proximity principle states that elements close to each other are consider to belong together, as if there were parts of the same object. An example of these principle is a paragraph, we will thing that the whole paragraph is about a specific subject, even if words are in different color.
The similarity principle states that elements that look similar are likely to be perceived as parts of the same group. An example of this principle would be if we saw 5 different dogs and 5 different cats, we will perceive them as a group of cat and a group of dogs.
Good continuation principle, is in the field of perception, when there is an intersection, between two or more objects, our minds will still see them as uninterrupted and different objects. These happens especially with lines. An example could be a herd of zebras, their lines continue across one another, making it difficult for predators to target a single one.
The law of closure, states that our visual system will fill in missing information and closes the outline of an incomplete figure even if some ques are absent. An example could be a drawing of a triangle with broken lines, we still perceive it as a triangle.
Lastly, the principle of common fate, elements that move in the same direction are being perceived as they belong together as forming a figure. An example could be a group of birds flying in the same direction, we instantly assume that they belong to a single group.
Gestalt still uses those principles in psychotherapy. In order to understand the nature of consciousness, they divided into its individual elements.
