Talk:Gestalt psychology

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:21, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

intro section
[sorry for potentially bad wiki-etiquette, I have no idea what I'm doing] the end of the intro section states "Gestalt theory, it is proposed, allows for the deconstruction of the whole situation into its elements" ... surely the opposite is true? As in the whole point of the Gestalt idea would be that the whole is more than the sum of its elements" ? Could someone please double-check that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.107.243.22 (talk) 15:14, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Contributions
How do you add illustrations to this article? This article needs illustrations--crucial to teaching about Gestalt. Thanks! Dpr 02:42, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC) I have looked up Gestalt for an assignment in Introductory Psychology. Should the words "figural moment" that have no info when clicked be instead "figural movement"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.215.123.75 (talk) 20:29, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Above and first of all - and not only in English - the term Gestalt itself requires some cool sht definition and understanding. What does it mean, when we learn, that its meaning refers to any "Whole"? Holism is a nice reference. However, in more concrete terms, and departing from the visual perception (which is NOT the whole, it refers to, but rather an inadmissible self limitation of our understanding of Gestalt) we can translate Gestalt as the continuum / continuity of: Shape /Form, Colour, Texture, light effects like glare, movement and sound. Gestalt transmits physical properties and haptic experiences, which one may anticipate and may (or may not) experience, when getting closer and touching the artefact or natural being which we are thus observing. Talking of artefacts (as well as animals), we anticipate a sound, which fits the visual image. And also a kind of movement. E.g.: An Elephant moves differently from a Tiger. So: Why should a Jaguar (car) move like a Truck? However, beyond such simple example, we also anticipate a character, a way of "Being", based upon our perception of the whole, thus of a "Gestalt". Psychology of Perception, Information-Aesthetics and Semiotics are a key to nonverbal communication among beings as well as in the Design of Artefacts, in order to serve people, starting from man-artefact-relations. E.g. an airplane cockpit, where information should rather not mislead the "operators of complex systems" - Thus, we also relate Gestalt to Cybernetics: The art of steering a ship (machine, team, company) by means of information and feedback. All this may illustrate the enormous importance of conscientious understanding, use and criticism of Gestalt and Psychology of Perception, whereever decisions are made. Not only as customers, but as planners. And as directors deciding about offers and their reason to exist, in the eyes of their planned audiences as well as in the eyes of the rest of the world ... May this relate your theoretic perception and improvements regarding Gestalt and relate it to the responsibility of us all for a better world, which opens choices rather than directing the public. A comment by a "Gestalter" - a Definer of Gestalt - or, as current fashions call this profession occupied by too many unprofessional Wannabees: Design. Gerhard Eichweber www.value-design.org

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.5.193.122 (talk) 08:22, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

The use of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" is best understood as a derivative of "greater is He who is in you, than he who is in the world" (1 John 4:4). The problem with the article is that no attempt is made by wikipedia's administrators to see that this premise is put forth first. I have only found wikipedia's administrators, and the editors who support them, to be self-serving, hateful, rude, greedy, proud, less than copy-and-paste, idiotic antichrists. The further implications for any branch of science to deviate from Theologic roots is no different. - St. John the Baptist —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.124.28.153 (talk) 17:04, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Comment by someone else
The statement about the soap bubble is wrong. I know nothing about Gestalt Psychology, but a lot about math. There IS a mathematical formula for the surface of a spherical soap bubble ( |r| = constant); moreover, there is a mathematical theory explaining how it comes about (the calculus of variations). Whoever thought up the soap bubble example was probably unfamiliar with the math. OK, fine, so recast the statement so it says, "X" (Jung?) said: "Soap bubble yadda yadda yadda." Don't need to go into the math in this article (though might want to cross-link for the curious), but try not to make false statements.

Gestalt theory is talking about visual experience, therefore in the case of 'soap bubble' it is about the various 'visual' forces that balance each other in order to reudce 'visual' tention. It is not about physical formulation - the 'calculus of variations'. I know a little about mathmatics, but I do know something about Gestalt theory. I think you should 'try not to make false statements' before you have a basic understanding of the theory. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Iwylu (talk • contribs) 03:38, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

the dog
sorry, maybe it's the size, but it took me a lot of time and effort just see there was a dog in the picture. try showing it around the size it is, on the monitor screen or showing bigger illustrations. that's because now that i know there is a dog there, i can find it, but until i read it, i couldn't tell what was in the picture. capi 00:44, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Featured article
It's not there yet, but I think this one has featured article potential.

Prägnanz? - is there a missing law
I seem to remember that there were 7 laws, not 6. Wasn't there a 'Law of simplicity', whereby two overlapping silhouettes are still perceived as two shapes, rather than the single complex shape they make up? It's been a long time since I studied it, so I could be wrong. --HappyDog 14:26, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Rather, what you mean is covered by "Continuity" or, as tought in Italian: "Good Continuity" Interesting (optimistic) variant... See Gyorgy Kepes: "Language of Vision" as Key Book - and relate it to Siegfried Gedion: "Mechanisation takes Command" ... A combination, which may not appear obvious at a first glance, but certainly delivers manyfold insight in our world of Artefacts and their Gestalt. For more, also refer to "newer" books, like Attilio Marcolli: "Teoria del Campo" (Field Theory) as applied in Architecture and Design = Definiton of physical Artefacts) Direct Feedback, dialogue or enquieries welcome: Gerhard Eichweber, www.value-design.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.5.193.122 (talk) 08:48, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Helpful tip
If you can't see the dog in the emergence test, pierce a small hole in a piece of paper and look through that. The paper masks everything from your peripheral vision so that your brain concentrates on the information in the picture. You'll then probably see the dog instantly. After that, you'll never be able to interpret the picture any other way. BrownBean 12:19, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

2/6/2006 Law of Simplicity is a combination of various laws, so it is not missing unless you want to go into detail. -a.

Gestalt Discredited?
Since the article mentions that "Gestalt theories of visual perception, especially the Law of Pragnanz have been largely discredited by progess in computational neuroscience" I am missing some reference further on as to what it is that is discredited exactly and why.


 * I remember reading, I think in Cognitive Psychology by Eysenck and Keane, that although they haven't been explained in terms of their underlying neurological mechanisms, the Gestalt laws have not been disproven and are still considered valid for description and prediction of behaviour. Forlornturtle 10:35, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Like Freud's theories, Gestaltisms are so vague and non-predictive that they are impossible to disprove, which is why they persist. Meanwhile, neuroscience is progressing quite nicely, thank you, without any reference to them... As it says in the article, they are descriptors of what happens in vision. Not explanations, or disprovable theories. Bin them and move on. Famousdog 14:33, 18 May 2007 (UTC)


 * They are certainly predictive enough to be useful to designers. For example, pretty much any visual technique that works well in computer interfaces (boxes, lines, lists, tables, buttons, tabs) can be explained in terms of these laws, and they can be used to make analytical evaluations to help with design decisions. As long as a model makes reasonable predictions, it can be useful without being explanatory. But I guess this is a never-ending battle between psychologists and neuroscientists.
 * Anyway, I agree a reference is needed to back this statement up. I'll put in a "fact" template. Forlornturtle 16:57, 18 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I think we'd be better off rephrasing this statement to something like, "In some scholarly communities (eg. computational neuroscience) Gestalt principles have been disregarded. In others (eg. perceptual psychology, display design), on the other hand, Gestalt principles continued to be used and discussed today."  I think that would more be more accurate statement (to prove my point, do a google scholar search for "gestalt vision" and you'll find quite a bit of recent stuff).  Gosolowe 17:51, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Quoting Famousdog -- "Gestaltisms are so vague and non-predictive that they are impossible to disprove... As it says in the article, they are descriptors of what happens in vision. Not explanations, or disprovable theories. Bin them and move on."

Surely this misses the whole point? The gestaltisms are examples of why an atomistic theory of the mind is not an adequate one, and a gestalt one is -- this doesn't stand in opposition to neuroscience, as neuroscience may well turn out to BE the gestalt explanation. In fact, it seems to be going this way: the old idea that mind functions can be attributed to specific brain sections has been largely disproven, as we now know that various brain sections are involved in any one operation, and are thus responsible for numerous functions: in short, neuroscience appears to favour a gestalt interpretation over an atomistic one. Gestalt is the adequate description of neuroscientific explanations -- the two are reciprocal. However, I didn't feel at liberty to remove the line being debated myself as I've never posted here before. - Anon


 * Firstly, how do Gestaltisms show that an atomistic theory of the mind is not an adequate one? In my experience, the atomistic theory of mind (if by "atomistic" you mean psychological processes being reductible to the level of neurons and chemical processes) is progressing along quite nicely (without reference to Gestaltisms), thank you. Secondly, if neuroscience turns out to BE gestalt - what's the point of gestalt? Frankly, i think its only point is to allow people to sound clever and pontificate about vision/psychology without knowing the mechanics. As for the clash between the modular view of mind and the systems approach - we have learnt all this through computational and cognitive neuroscience, not gestalt. Gestalt theory never told us anything interesting, predictive or useful. Just a lot of generalisations. You say "Gestalt is the adequate description of neuroscientific explanations." Surely, neuroscientific explanations are an adequate description of themselves - why do we need gestalt? (as an addendum, i've changed the wording of the offensive sentence as gestalt has not really been discredited just rendered redundant) Famousdog 22:27, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Just feel that some further reply is necessary here. If neuroscience turns out to validate the Gestalt prinicples, then we (Neuroscience?) should have been using Gestalt principles to guide investigations into neural substrates instead of "dumping Gestalt principles" or something like that. Gestalt IS "descriptive", but there's nothing derogatory about descriptive theory. Theory guides the search for mechanisms and mechanisms elucidate theory. Without theory, mechanisms explain nothing (as there is no explanation, just computations). If we could replicate the human brain from all of it's mechanisms, would we have any significant understanding of how it works, i.e. something we could talk about with other people? Without mechanisms, theory is not inert if it makes behavioral predictions (though it is less likely to thrive from reciprocal advances). Some of the best Psychology around today (including the Gestalt principles) come from Theories that make testable predictions about behavior, not necessarily about neurons. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.54.234.132 (talk) 03:16, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Regardless of the validity of the Gestalt principles, they are in fact widely used in some psychological research on attention. In order to reflect this (and remain neutral), I've changed the last sentence of the opening paragraph and added a section about their Applications to Modern Perceptual Psychology.Gosolowe 13:08, 25 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm happy with your re-wording. Its very diplomatic! Famousdog 13:48, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Bin your happiness and move on.Lestrade (talk) 16:29, 25 December 2007 (UTC)Lestrade

Stuff...
I'm just curious how anyone would relate Gestalt Psychology to ministry.

Shouldn't one spell Pragnanz correctly Prägnanz? It is still a German word and has not really become an English word. Any objections?

Please fix this page. I've tried fixing it but I don't have time to fine tune my mistakes. -Bhargav_mr 167.206.174.75 13:44, 1 February 2006 (UTC) Thanks -Bhargav_mr

Supporting citation does not support
The following statement is made in the introduction: "Gestalt theories of perception are often criticized for being descriptive rather than explanatory in nature. In some scholarly communities (eg. computational neuroscience), thus, Gestalt principles are viewed as redundant or uninformative". The current location of the supporting citation is this web page: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~smgxscd/ContourResearch.html.

This web page appears to be related to computational models useful for contour mapping tasks. It makes no argument that Gestalt principles are either redundant or uninformative. Previous versions had a different sentence and perhaps the purpose of the link was once an example of what computaional neuroscience is concerned with. If so, perhaps the link belongs in the Computational Neuroscience article. On the other hand, maybe a web page supporting the statement exists on the web site, but the link references the wrong one. -Mak 19:48, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Reference to "Reification (fallacy)"
I am curious why under the Reification header - which is about how the mind 'completes' pictures - there is a "see also" link to Reification (fallacy) - which is about treating an abstract as a physical entity. I see that they are somewhat related, but I don't see why people reading this article would be so interested in the other one that it warrants a link. Can anyone clarify, or should we take the link out? Frostlion 21:25, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Seconded! I am here because of the a similar observation. In fact, I don't think that these two senses of "reification" are related in any way. Reconstructing the idea of a 3D object from contour hints is not the same thing as making a fallacious argument by supposing abstract concepts to be physically real.192.139.122.42 (talk) 22:10, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Emergence demonstration example
The article uses the image of a dog to demonstrate the idea of emergence, however this isn't demonstrating emergence but rather the lack of it. The paragraph in the article explicitly states that the dog is not made up of the individual parts of a dog, but that it is seen as a whole immediately, thus going against emergence. Should it be reworded to reflect this? — metaprimer (talk) 16:05, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

POV tag in Criticism section
The earlier discussion on Gestalt being discredited did not have an adequate defense of gestalt psychology. The criticism section of this article thus has a POV problem. The view that gestalt principles are defunct and should be replaced with computational neuroscience is a POV.

Point 1: Gestalt principles are experimentally disprovable.

Consider the circle in the "Law of Closure" example in the Pragnanz section of this very Wikipedia article. If the principle of closure were false, then people would not say they saw a circle. They would say they saw a group of lines. They would have to guess if you asked them to say whether it was a circle, a triangle, or a square. So, if there were no principle of closure, then, when given a forced choice between circle, triangle, and square, one would expect subjects to say circle only 33% of the time because they are simply guessing between three alternatives. The theoretical hypothesis is that subjects will say circle when shown the lines significantly more than 33% of the time. The null hypothesis is that subjects will say circle only 33% of the time or less. These are experimentally testable hypotheses.

If you want a more sophisticated example, here's an actual study: "Figure-ground organization refers to the visual perception that a contour separating two regions belongs to one of the regions. Recent studies have found neural correlates of figure-ground assignment in V2 as early as 10-25 ms after response onset, providing strong support for the role of local bottom-up processing. How much information about figure-ground assignment is available from locally computed cues? Using a large collection of natural images, in which neighboring regions were assigned a figure-ground relation by human observers, we quantified the extent to which figural regions locally tend to be smaller, more convex, and lie below ground regions. Our results suggest that these Gestalt cues are ecologically valid, and we quantify their relative power. We have also developed a simple bottom-up computational model of figure-ground assignment that takes image contours as input. Using parameters fit to natural image statistics, the model is capable of matching human-level performance when scene context limited." (Fowlkes, Martin, & Malik, 2007, p. 2)

The claim that gestalt principles are not empirically disprovable is a POV.

Point 2:Gestalt principles continue to be used in psychological research. Here are four examples:

"Gestalt properties, such as proximity and good continuation, play a prominent role in human object recognition. Good continuation is a fundamental, low-level property of the visual system; it allows the observer to perceive smooth contour despite gaps or partial occlusion, permitting recognition of partially obscured objects. In the case of a gap, it allows edge relationships to become salient. This does not necessarily lead to visual completion, but it is a prerequisite of the process. The human visual system is able to rapidly and automatically complete missing visual information, and it has been suggested that the observer actually perceives the complete image despite partial occlusion (Kanizsa, 1979). Although the gestalt principle of good continuation clearly contributes to human and primate vision (see Fujita, 2001, 2006; Grossberg & Mingolla, 1985; Sekuler & Palmer, 1992; Yin, Kellman, & Shipley, 1997), the evidence relating to the operation of this principle in pigeon visual perception is unconvincing." (Kirkpatrick, Wilkinson, and Johnston, 2007, p. 273) "To acquire a mature view of the visual environment, a person must organize individual parts into coherent wholes. Because there are an indefinite number of ways to organize the surfaces and edge fragments of visual displays, the question of how infants and children achieve perceptual organization has been a source of theoretical debate and empirical inquiry throughout the last century of scientific psychology. Some theorists have suggested that perceptual organization is developmentally late and crucially dependent on an extended period of learning visual and motor associations (Hebb, 1949; Piaget, 1952). Alternatively, Gestalt psychologists have long claimed that perceptual grouping reflects the activity of a nervous system that is naturally constrained to follow certain principles that impose organization from the very first encounter with a visual pattern (e.g., Kohler, 1929)." (Quinn & Bhatt, 2006, p. 1221) "Perceptual grouping is the process by which elements in the visual image are aggregated into larger and more complex structures, i.e., "objects." This paper reports a study of the spatial factors and time-course of the development of objects over the course of the first few hundred milliseconds of visual processing. The methodology uses the now well-established idea of an "object benefit" for certain kinds of tasks (here, faster within-object than between-objects probe comparisons) to test what the visual system in fact treats as an object at each point during processing. The study tested line segment pairs in a wide variety of spatial configurations at a range of exposure times, in each case measuring the strength of perceptual grouping as reflected in the magnitude of the object benefit. Factors tested included nonaccidental properties such as collinearity, cotermination, and parallelism; contour relatability; Gestalt factors such as symmetry and skew symmetry, and several others, all tested at fine (25 msec) time-slices over the course of processing. The data provide detailed information about the comparative strength of these factors in inducing grouping at each point in processing. The result is a vivid picture of the chronology of object formation, as objects progressively coalesce, with fully bound visual objects completed by about 200 msec of processing." (Feldman, 2007, p. 816) "This study examined gestalt perception in high-functioning autism (HFA) and its relation to tasks indicative of local visual processing. Data on of gestalt perception, visual illusions (VI), hierarchical letters (HL), Block Design (BD) and the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) were collected in adult males with HFA, schizophrenia, depression and normative controls. Individuals with HFA processed gestalt stimuli less in accord with gestalt laws, particularly regarding the principle of similarity. Gestalt processing correlated positively with global processing of the HL. EFT and BD performance correlated negatively with VI susceptibility in HFA. All clinical groups succumbed less to VI than the normative sample. Results suggest decreased gestalt perception in HFA, being associated with a more general local visual processing bias." (Bolte, Holtmann, Poustka, Scheurich, & Schmidt, 2007, p. 1493)

The claim that gestalt principles are no longer useful and should be thrown into the dustbins of history is a POV.

 Is there a 'Point 3' missing? 

Point 4: The dichotomy between gestalt principles and neuroscience is false. Here are two examples of gestalt principles in neuroscientific studies. The first includes gestalt principles in a computational model: "Before we can recognize a visual object, our visual system has to segregate it from its background. This requires a fast mechanism for establishing the presence and location of objects independently of their identity. Recently, border-ownership neurons were recorded in monkey visual cortex which might be involved in this task [Zhou, H., Friedmann, H., von der Heydt, R., 2000. Coding of border ownership in monkey visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 20 (17), ]. In order to explain the basic mechanisms required for fast coding of object presence, we have developed a neural network model of visual cortex consisting of three stages. Feed-forward and lateral connections support coding of Gestalt properties, including similarity, good continuation, and convexity. Neurons of the highest area respond to the presence of an object and encode its position, invariant of its form. Feedback connections to the lowest area facilitate orientation detectors activated by contours belonging to potential objects, and thus generate the experimentally observed border-ownership property. This feedback control acts fast and significantly improves the figure-ground segregation required for the consecutive task of object recognition." (Zwickel, Wachtler, & Eckhorn, 2007, p. 216)   The second study uses gestalt principles to investigate the theoretical concept of intuition from a neuroscientific approach: "According to the Oxford English Dictionary, intuition is "the ability to understand or know something immediately, without conscious reasoning." Most people would agree that intuitive responses appear as ideas or feelings that subsequently guide our thoughts and behaviors. It is proposed that people continuously, without conscious attention, recognize patterns in the stream of sensations that impinge upon them. What exactly is being recognized is not clear yet, but we assume that people detect potential content based on only a few aspects of the input (i.e., the gist). The result is a vague perception of coherence which is not explicitly describable but instead embodied in a "gut feeling" or an initial guess, which subsequently biases thought and inquiry. To approach the nature of intuitive processes, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging when participants were working at a modified version of the Waterloo Gestalt Closure Task. Starting from our conceptualization that intuition involves an informed judgment in the context of discovery, we expected activation within the median orbito-frontal cortex (OFC), as this area receives input from all sensory modalities and has been shown to be crucially involved in emotionally driven decisions. Results from a direct contrast between intuitive and nonintuitive judgments, as well as from a parametric analysis, revealed the median OFC, the lateral portion of the amygdala, anterior insula, and ventral occipito-temporal regions to be activated. Based on these findings, we suggest our definition of intuition to be promising and a good starting point for future research on intuitive processes." (Volz & von Cramon, 2006, p. 2077). The claim that gestalt principles should be replaced by computational neurscience is a POV.

Point 5: If gestalt principles turn out to be the result of neural computations, then we still need a good section on gestalt principles. The gestalt researchers deserve credit for discovering the principles first. An encyclopedia (such as Wikipedia) should be careful to credit discoveries appropriately.

Point 6: Here is an alternative point of view about gestalt psychology published by experts in a respected academic journal: "Psychology is prone to intellectual fads. The field can be criticized for embracing novel ideas and discarding prior ones without necessarily resolving the issues that gave rise to the earlier thinking. This charge, of course, is not unique to psychology; it applies to many of the sciences. The almost wholesale replacement of relativity theory by quantum mechanics in physics in the 20th century is one such example. The linear scala naturae reasoning of Spencer that largely supplanted the richer Darwinian evolutionary thinking is another. Yet, in recent years it has occasionally been recognized that the potential relevance of a body of theory or data does not disappear with its loss of popularity. Modern physics is reuniting relativity and the standard model under the banner of superstring theory, and the theory of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary biology has made sense of a number of the more obscure factors in the Spencerian model." "A retrospective view of experimental psychology might yield similar insights. The rich tradition of research in the Gestalt mode is ignored in much modern work. Overshadowed by the long popularity of behaviorism and scattered by the chaos preceding the Second World War, Gestalt theory has had only a modest influence on modern thinking in such areas as cognitive psychology, beyond a few historical acknowledgments. Yet, in a wide variety of fields, it could be claimed that the Gestaltists "got there first." The focus on mental activity, the idea of isomorphic relationships between brain events and experience, and the inclusion of organismic and contextual factors in the study of psychological variables all were part of the Gestalt tradition. As psychology adopts ever more literal machine (computer) metaphors of mind and brain (metaphors typically of such complexity that a larger view is seldom taken or sought), it might be productive to examine again the Gestalt tradition, a tradition of experimental psychology focused on context and organism rather than on disembodied modular components of hypothetical mental and physical structures." (Sharps, & Wertheimer, 2000, p. 315) The POV policy of Wikipedia entitles this view to expression in the article.

Summary: The view that gestalt principles are defunct and should be replaced with computational neuroscience is a POV. A more balanced criticism of gestalt might read something like this:

Gestalt no longer enjoys the popularity it once had in psychology. The principles of gestalt psychology are descriptive in nature rather than explanatory. This has limited the ability of gestalt psychology to drive new research. In addition, alternative theories of perception have arisen that make no reference to gestalt principles, with computational neuroscientific models offering an example. Computational neuroscience models of perception are not based on gestalt principles.

Yet, the principles of gestalt psychology remain valid descriptions and continue to be used in current research. Researchers have demonstrated gestalt principles in animal perception, have discovered patterns in the development of gestalt principles, and have used gestalt principles to investigate perception in psychological disorders. Neuroscience has also started to deal with gestalt principles. Additionally, gestalt principles have found practical application in software engineering (e.g., interface design and artificial vision).

Thus, while gestalt principles are no longer a major focus of psychological research and have limited value as a general theoretical approach to perception, they continue to contribute to our undertanding of perception and remain a phenomenon to be explained by more modern theories of perception.

references  Bolte, S., Holtmann, M., Poustka, F., Scheurich, A., & Schmidt L (2007). Gestalt perception and local-global processing in high-functioning autism. Journal Of Autism And Developmental Disorders, 37,.  Feldman, J. (2007). Formation of visual "objects" in the early computation of spatial relations. Perception & Psychophysics, 69, 816-27. Fowlkes, C.C., Martin, D.R., & Malik, J. (2007). Local figure-ground cues are valid for natural images. Journal Of Vision, 7, 2. Fujita, K. (2001). Perceptual completion in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and pigeons (Columba livia). Perception & Psychophysics, 63, 115–125. Fujita, K. (2006). Seeing what is not there: Illusion, completion, and spatiotemporal boundary formation in comparative perspective. In E. A. Wasserman & T. R. Zentall (Eds.), Comparative cognition: Experimental explorations of animal intelligence (pp. 29–52). New York: Oxford University Press. Fujita, K., & Giersch, A. (2005). What perceptual rules do capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) follow in completing partly occluded figures? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 31, 387–398. Grossberg, S., & Mingolla, E. (1985). Neural dynamics of form perception: Boundary completion, illusory figures, and neon color spreading. Psychological Review, 92, 173–211. <li>Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior. New York: Wiley.</li> <li>Kanizsa, G. (1979). Organization in vision: Essays on Gestalt perception. New York: Praeger. <li>Kohler, W. (1929). Gestalt psychology. New York: Horace Liveright.</li> <li>Kirkpatrick, K., Wilkinson, A., & Johnston, S. (2007). Pigeons discriminate continuous versus discontinuous line segments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 33, 273-286.</li> <li>Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York: Norton. <li>Quinn, P.C., & Bhatt, R.S. (2006). Are Some Gestalt Principles Deployed More Readily Than Others During Early Development? The Case of Lightness Versus Form Similarity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, .</li> <li>Sekuler, A. B., & Palmer, S. E. (1992). Perception of partly occluded objects: A microgenetic analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121, 95–111.</li> <li>Sharps, M.J., Wertheimer, M. (2000). Review of General Psychology, 4, 315-336.</li> <li>Volz, K.G., & von Cramon, D.Y. (2006). What neuroscience can tell about intuitive processes in the context of perceptual discovery. Journal Of Cognitive Neuroscience,18, .</li> <li>Yin, C., Kellman, P. J., & Shipley, T. F. (1997). Surface completion complements boundary formation in the visual integration of partly occluded objects. Perception, 26, 95–111.</li> <li>Zwickel, T., Wachtler, T., & Eckhorn, R. (2007). Coding the presence of visual objects in a recurrent neural network of visual cortex. Bio Systems, 89, 216-26.</li> </ul>

Agreed with "POV Criticism"
I won't pretend to the level of erudition in that comment. My simpler criticism extends to the POV tone of the article as a whole: the statement that the weakness of Gestalt Psychology is that it is descriptive rather than explanatory is made repeatedly, not just under "criticisms". A branch of psychology that is referenced as much as Gestalt is must surely have made some positive contribution.

--207.81.123.251 (talk) 00:37, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Agreed #2 with "POV Criticism"
The article is overly occupied with "descriptive rather than explanatory" disclaimers that are not in the spirit of Wikipedia. The general theory of relativity makes mathamatical predictions about gravity that are quite accurate, but it does not explain gravity. Similarly, the POV tag in Criticism section above, aptly shows in Point 1 above that Gestalt concepts do make predictions with statistical significance without necessarily explaining the mechanism. Science is as much about making statistical correlations between observations as it is about verifying mechanisms that underlie those correlates. Even feature detection studied in both neuroscience and modeled in computational models do not explain how the brain perceives. The former merely makes statistical correlations between what a subject perceives and what the brain activity is at that time. The later then surmises a "theory" that this statistical correlation portends some mechanism that a computer can then replicate. Note, however, that these computational models still can not do what a three year old human can in terms of recognizing invariant objects in a myriad of contexts. This does not mean that the computational models are wrong, but it also does not render Gestalt efforts - to observe and categorize what a three year old can do - as useless. In fact, it is quite the contrary. It is exactly such observations in other disciplines throughout history that have refined older assumptions in order to advance scientific understanding.

Such examples include Copernicus's theory of planetary motion that wasn't proven until Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter. The "math" of the day supported the geocentric model via the elaborate mathematics of retrograde motion. Another example is the very useful Newtonian mechanics that was updated by Einstein and Quantum Theory to explain observations that were unthinkable in Newton's time. I bring these historical facts up to underscore the point that neither neuroscience nor computational models explain all that human perception can do; either in theory or in practice. Currently, vision science has made progress in correlating simple feature detection with neurons in the visual context. But, to date, there is no empirical data that explains how these fundamental feature detectors cohere in higher brain regions to perceive more complex objects in a scene. Gestalt theory, instead of proving the existing research wrong or holding future research back, actually help focus research to investigate what we can observe to be statistically significant about our capacity for higher order perception. Wolfworks (talk) 07:12, 4 January 2008 (UTC)


 * By all means, Gestalt is important in the history of Psychology, however, the majority of the "principles" and "laws" identified by Gestalt theorists have now been elucidated (in whole or part) by other fields (comp neurosci, cog psych, visual sci, etc.) and the perceptual work of the Gestaltists is now thoroughly superceded. Learning by rote all the Gestalt principles gives the reader the feeling that they are learning something when in fact such principles are tautological or truisms: We experience a "closed" figure because of the principle of "closure" - such a statement is useless and hardly compares to the formulation of Copernicus' theory of planetary motion (a feat of incredible deduction from the available evidence from careful observation of the motion of the planets - and possible without a theory of gravitation). We need a functional or computational account of how closure occurs, not just a statement that it does. Finally, if the criticism section is soooo offensively POV, then do something about it instead of tagging it (a passive aggressive move if ever there was one) and complaining here! That's how Wikipedia works you know! Famousdog (talk) 18:55, 9 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I totally agree with you, Wolfworks. I think the only productive direction to take, though, is basically to prove the article's and Famousdog's claims of uselessness wrong by showing the advances in the study of perception that have relied on the discoveries of Gestalt, at least ones where credit is notably given to Gestalt. And unfortunately, that probably narrows the options down terribly.
 * For instance, the study of the movement of the eye to take in relevant details would surely not have been studied had it not been known that we only require small details to make up a whole perception. The tiny circle of vision that actually makes up the full measure of our attention might have been discovered independently, as it is more of a physical phenomenon, but the great likelihood is that this too relied on the discoveries of Gestalt. Has this been credited as a result of Gestalt? If not, then we would have to look harder, and I think the great likelihood is that there is just a great injustice done here that we can not redress in this article. All of these discoveries are Gestalt, but for some unknown reason, most scientists in the field took great pains to distance themselves as far away as possible from the name. And I have another theory, too, about the reason for this, which is that the optical illusions of Gestalt are perhaps the most commonly recognized finding of Psychology, and scientists really hate it when some other science gets more popular attention than theirs....Gestalt has indeed found out the way in which Gestalt perception works, in many ways, all called something else. 24.5.21.150 (talk) 03:18, 11 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for weighing in on an argument I had over 2 years ago. Since the article has substantially changed and much of the criticism of Gestalt has been displaced to the (very short) 'criticisms' section, your agreement with Wolfworks would seem rather redundant. I don't understand your argument at all, and I don't buy this "Gestalt hasn't been properly credited" conspiracy-theory nonsense. Far from it. In my opinion the Gestalt school receives too much attention in perception textbooks. It seems from your comments that you simply have a different POV than I do. The article as it stands is fairly NPOV. Famousdog (talk) 13:08, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

"doobies"?
I think someone has had a little "fun" in the 1st paragraph of the "Origin" section. I don't know enough about Wiki - or Gestalt - to attempt to correct it myself. And pardon my ignorance if there is a valid connection! 24.7.12.86 (talk) 02:57, 25 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Fixed it. It's easy to edit WP. Just click on the "edit this page" tab at the top. You don't even need a username to begin editing (although its helpful!). Famousdog (talk) 18:02, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

History Section Badly Needed
The article says "(See History of Psychology by David Hothersall (2004), chapter seven, for complete history)" but I think this information deserves to be in the article itself, not referenced. There is also an "Origins" section, but this lacks dates like a History section should have. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.126.165.218 (talk) 17:31, 3 April 2010 (UTC) Pppp — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.169.162.174 (talk) 20:30, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

opposed to structuralism & Wundt?
I wanted to understand better how exactly it was opposed to structuralism and Wundt. While structuralism's conflict with Gestalt was apparent - Wundt is another issue entirely. I believe from what I understood so far that the phrase should be changed to "In psychology, gestalt is opposed to Titchener's structuralism(psychology)."

The page on Wundt so far reads "Wundt is argued by some writers to have been a devout foundationalist, working tirelessly to understand the intricacies of the areas of knowledge he studied to form a coherent, atomistic understanding of the universe." which would kind of go against the holistic approach gestalt would propose... but it seems so far that nobody knows what Wundt believed.

I believe also that the criticism article should maybe include some reference to structuralism or Wundt - as it is now... structuralism and Wundt are only mentioned in the lead.--Kiyarr lls- talk 00:01, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Page improvement templates removed
I have restored the page top templates calling for more citations and the attention of an expert because there has been no recent discussion about them here, and I see no consensus for their removal. I have no objection to removing them if a consensus to do so develops here. -- Donald Albury 10:11, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

Add German for pithiness
Add (German for pithiness) 99.19.43.8 (talk) 02:35, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Evaluation
According to Wikipedia standards, this article does not meet "good citation" requirements for various reasons. 1. The notification located at the top of the article, highlighting the need for further citation and sourcing. Without sufficient background information, from reliable sources, the article very well may present information incorrectly or inaccurately. 2. Unsourced opinions and value statements. Including generalities throughout the opening paragraph specifically indicates information that is without source. Looking back, including information that is generalized spreads knowledge too thin. 3. Unnamed groups of people. In the section, "Gestalt Views in Psychology" a remarkably low number of sources are employed. Little citation and vague information is too general and should be replaced with more specific links. 4. The criticism section is incredibly short, suggesting a lack of sufficient information. Previously, citations have been the primary concern but towards the end of the article, lack of information all together is more alarming.

--Spearmanm (talk) 02:26, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Mixed adjectives
User Erindal added this sentence at the beginning of the article: "Gestalt psychology tries to understand the laws of our ability to acquire and maintain stable percepts in a noisy world." The words "stable" and "noisy" are not opposites. Also, "noisy world" is metaphorical and unclear.Lestrade (talk) 03:18, 23 November 2012 (UTC)Lestrade
 * Agree! Maybe we should just change the word noisy into unstable?  Lova Falk     talk   15:10, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

The concept of "acquiring and maintaining stable percepts in an unstable world" is very obscure and not readily understandable. If used, it should be fully cited.Lestrade (talk) 01:18, 29 November 2012 (UTC)Lestrade
 * I have left Erindal a message, I hope s/he'll read this.  Lova Falk     talk   17:27, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

What is the purpose of the gestalt and design section?
As far as I can see, it's just a random collection of images with no explanation as to why they're chosen, or what their purpose is.2001:630:212:238:7254:D2FF:FEC5:1EF6 (talk) 10:44, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Koffka on "the sum of the parts"
The second paragraph of this Wikipedia entry says that "The whole is other than the sum of the parts", citing a 2010 article by Michael Tuck. That source doesn't provide any support for the "The whole is other than the sum of the parts" statement, and I've been unable to run it down.

I have done some research, and can verify a version of "the whole is different from the sum of its parts" from Heider 1977, and "the whole is something else than the sum of its parts" from Koffka 1935. I've written this up at http://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/synergy-parts-wholes/#two.

My concern is now that people are using Wikipedia as a source of information, and are copying this other than phrase, when it's unverified.

If the original source is the 2003 page at http://www.intropsych.com/ch04_senses/whole_is_other_than_the_sum_of_the_parts.html, that article cites the Heider 1977 article, which clearly reads different from rather than other than. I am not a psychologist, and have never studied Gestalt, but am a diligent stickler for citations.

If someone can find the other than language, I would appreciate that. I think that I'll let some time pass, and if no one can actually find a source where Koffka wrote or spoke these, words, we should change the text in Wikipedia. Daviding (talk) 23:41, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Kurt Koffka was German. Could the difference be explained by a variation in translation? WoutR (talk) 17:51, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

To add to the issue, my mother is doing research on Gestalt Theory & came across this quote which she believes is wrongly attributed. I think she read in her textbook that it was actually Ernest Mayr. I’ve done some rather basic online searching & found 1 uncited source claiming that Max Wertheimer coined the phrase in the ‘20s. On top of all this, the misquote “the whole is greater...” seems actually to be of Aristotle’s works. As it pertains to “the whole is other...” I believe the Gestalt “Theorists” had a lot of freely flowing ideas regarding this quote & not 1 person is soley responsible for this quote. Although it may be true that Kurt Koffka rebuked people for misquoting him, from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem fair to only attribute him to this quote. Additionally, I think bringing in Aristotle’s quote (or whoever’s it is) as a contrast may help readers to better grasp the quotes as they are dealt with in culture & history. My searches were done with Bing searching the queries “the whole is other than the sum of its parts” & the same being preceeded with “Ernest Mayr”, although I myself haven’t found anything attributing the quote to Mayr. Dfcorrea00 (talk) 06:49, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

==Edit: It was I who saw “Ernest Mayr”, my apologies. My mother actually found a reference to Immanuel Kant (a completeley different guy) who died before Koffka was born. At least some of his works are on the topic of “object perception”, the concepts of which are partially explained in the quote. It seems that there is already a lot of comfusion on the quote & this article in general, but I’ll leave some information on the textbook as a reference: A History of Modern Psychology eleventh edition bu Duane P. Schultz & Sydney Ellen Schultz ISBN-13: 978-1-305-63004-8 (C) 2016, 2012 Cengage Learning Print year 2015, print number 01 (I have no experience with citing textbooks, so I was exhaustive in what I thought might be relevant Dfcorrea00 (talk) 07:14, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

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Original Phrase
I taught Psychology for many years, and do not remember coming across how "the whole is more than the sum total of its parts" to be more correctly translated as "the whole is other than the sum total of its parts". Thank you Wikipedia - you are still educating me. Vorbee (talk) 17:26, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Max Wertheimer
This article could more clearly spell out how Max Wertheimer is normally considered the founder of Gestalt psychology, and how Kurt Lewin applied Gestalt principles to social and developmental psychology. Vorbee (talk) 17:32, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

"the whole is something else than the sum of its parts" is a quote from Aristotle, not Koffka
Ref: ”The original famous phrase of Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, "the whole is something else than the sum of its parts”. Obviously, the author is Aristotle. The full quote from Koffka’s book is: ”It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.” Koffka quoted in fact Euclid, and then corrected Euclid’s form of the phrase, by using the original form of Aristotle. Of course, I cannot verify if Koffka already knew or not the original source, but since he was in fact already quoting a version of the phrase, it is incorrect to consider him as the original author. The actual source is obviously Aristotle: ”The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts”. Metaphysics, Book VIII, 1045a.8–10. Another translation of Aristotle that i found: ” …things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts…”. I would also note that even if this quote of Aristotle is in fact always slightly taken out of context, nevertheless it is obviously Aristotle who coined the phrase, and it is obviously a fundamental principle in his whole metaphysics. Stefanmrv (talk) 09:18, 1 May 2018 (UTC)`


 * I dunno i guess it depends on whether you consider something translated as being the same thing as the "exact same set and order of words" -- obv aristotle never said jack in english, it didn't exist yet. I guess for that matter neither might potentially be the true "authors" of the phrase, bc possibly koffka never said those words either, although certainly he lived at a time of the current english language, so maybe he was bilingual. Seems more likely the germanik influence in english would make it more likely the meaning of words would map directly 1-for-1 such that a quote should be considered the same original thought.
 * So how...hmm.. surely this kinda question has to have come up before? Is there a way this kinda thing is consensus adjudicated? Academia must have rules about this kinda thing right? I'd venture to guess it depends on how the latin version of the phrase -- actually i think it would be greek now that i'm thinking about it, aristotle would've spoke ancient greek i presume -- worked... like syntax wise? Can we get a greek expert in here who knows how that would break down in english/german? 96.41.90.174 (talk) 08:48, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Dog image
Can a suitable dog image be obtained and added to the Properties / Emergence section? Because that section begins with "This is demonstrated by the dog picture,..." it seems particularly important to provide an example of that picture. See: http://optical-illusions.wikia.com/wiki/Emergence for an example. I am not clear on the intellectual property rights status of that image. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (talk) 21:31, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

current templates status
This article seems reasonably sourced, and I'm not sure where the neutrality issue lies, if it's even still there. Can these two templates be removed? On another note, this article switches between parenthetical citations and ref tags randomly, so I added a 'citation style' template.--Megaman en m (talk) 21:53, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

thank you!
Whoever spends their time making this kind of an article better by healthy debate are my kind of people. The detail and clearness are great, and... its greatly scratching the itch of this possibly a little-bit-high fellow human. Thank you. -the rest of humanity 96.41.90.174 (talk) 08:33, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article was the subject of an educational assignment at Western University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2012 Q1 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 15:55, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Psychology Capstone
— Assignment last updated by Rahneli (talk) 20:11, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Disc Gestalt
to both then and now mathematics is the foundation of the study of ultra. HexClock (talk) 18:30, 12 October 2023 (UTC)