Gestalt Laws of Organization

Gestalt Laws of Organization We organize our experiences according to certain rules, in a simple way:

Proximity: Close or nearer objects are perceived as coherent and related.

Similarity: Tendency to perceive objects, patterns or stimuli as groups, which are similar in appearance parts of the visual field that are similar in color, lightness, texture, shape, or any other quality

Good Continuation: Tendency to group the stimuli into smooth and continuous patterns or parts

Closure: It is the perceptual tendency to fill in the gaps and completing the contours; enables us to perceive the disconnected parts as the whole object.

Figure and Ground: Our perceptual tendency to see objects with the foreground as well as the background the object is being recognized with respect to its background. e.g. black board and chalk. (These will be discussed in detail in the section of perception).

Kurt Koffka

• Wrote the famous “Principles of Gestalt Psychology” (1935)

• Talked about geographical versus behavioral environment: people’s behavior is determined by how they perceive the environment rather than by the nature of the environment.

Wolfgang Kohler

• Gave the concept of “insight” and “transposition”, as a result of his observations of a caged chimpanzee and experiments with chickens

• Insight = spontaneous restructuring of the situation

• Transposition = generalization of knowledge from one situation to another

• Kohler also talked about Isomorphism; changes in the brain structure yield changes in experiences

Other major contributions

• Gestalt approach to ethics: Truth is truth when it is complete and corresponds fully to the facts of the situation

• Zeigarnik’s Effect: Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments; we remember interrupted tasks better.

The tension caused by unfinished tasks helps us in remembering

• Group Dynamics: Instead of focusing on people’s individual attributes we should see them as whole persons