Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt Psychology is the result of a combined effort between Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler. It comes as a reaction to the structural and functional trends which were prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th century. Gestalt Psychology is an outright rejection of the strongly atomistic and associative trends of which early psychology was fond. The basic premise of gestalt psychology is often described by use of the age old saying that "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts" (originally stated by Aristotle). While this serves as a good starting point, it does not quite capture the full concept of Gestalt psychology. On this matter, Kurt Koffka stated that "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 up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful."(Koffka, 1935)

In its early days, Gestalt psychology dealt mostly with perception. By all previous accounts, perception stood in a one-to-one relationship with physical phenomena. This assumption, however, proved somewhat problematic, as was first highlighted in 1912 when Wertheimer discovered what he labeled the phi phenomena; there is a threshold at which a series of rapidly presented individual pictures will sees to be perceived individuals, instead being perceived as a moving image. This is the principle by which motion pictures operate. By displaying continuous images in rapid successive order (at least around 17 fames per second), rather than perceiving individual images, one perceives motion of one continuous image. This inexplicable phenomena was one of many which were discovered over the coming years, the only explanation of which, according to the Gestalt theorists, was that the perceptual process must be viewed as a gestalt (The word gestalt translates poorly into English, but is loosely translated as whole).

The basic principle behind gestalt psychology is the law of Pragnanz, which states that our perception tends to be ordered in such a manor that it is regular, orderly, symmetric, and simple. Prgnanz can be broken down into 6 common laws:

1. Law of Closure - The mind is predisposed to perceive elements which are not experienced through sensation, so as to increase the regularity of a figure. In simple terms, the mind tends to fill in the blanks.
2. Law of Proximity - The mind tends to perceive elements which are spaced close together (either temporally or spatially) as part of a group or whole.
3. Law of Similarity - The mind tends to group individual elements into collections or wholes based on common characteristics such as size, shape, color, brightness, etc.
4. Law of Symmetry - The mind tends to perceive symmetrical images as a collective, despite spatial or temporal distance or interruption.
5. Law of Continuity - The mind tends to continue patterns in visual, auditory, and kinetic stimulus.
6. Law of Common Fate - The mind tends to group elements which are moving in a particular direction or at a particular speed as.

The chief method of study for Gestalt psychologists was phenomenology, a method which employs the purely descriptive documentation of experienced phenomena, with little to no limitation or boundaries as to what can be described.

Since it's founding, Gestalt principles have been almost all other areas of human experience, including: learning, problem solving, thinking, motivation, social psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and personality.

(Kurt Koffka, 1935: New York: Harcourt-Brace. p 176)