Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [188]
Using these data plus his experiments at Frankfurt, Wertheimer drew up the outlines of a new psychology in a 1913 series of lectures. The central doctrine was that our mental operations consist chiefly of Gestalten rather than strings of associated sensations and impressions, as followers of Wundt and associationists believed. A Gestalt, he said, was not a mere accumulation of associated bits but a structure with an identity; it was different from and more than the sum of its parts. The acquisition of knowledge often took place through a process of “centering” or structuring and thereby seeing things as an orderly whole.9
Although Wertheimer envisioned Gestalt theory as the basis of an entire psychology, much of his research and more than half the research of all Gestalt psychologists in the early years dealt with perception.*10 Within a dozen years the three leading Gestaltists, their students, and several other Gestalt-oriented psychologists had discovered a number of principles of perception, or “laws of Gestalten.” Wertheimer, drawing on his and others’ findings, named and discussed a handful of the major laws in one of his rare papers in 1923,11 and as time went on he, his colleagues, and their students discovered many others. (Eventually 114 laws of Gestalten were named.12) Here are a few of the more important ones:
Proximity: When we see a number of similar objects, we tend to perceive them as groups or sets of those which are close to each other. Wertheimer’s simple demonstration:
FIGURE 3
The Law of Proximity: a simple case
People shown the line of dots, he found, spontaneously see it as pairs of dots close to each other (ab/cd/ …), and while it could also be construed as pairs of widely spaced dots with little room between the pairs (a/bc/de/ …), no one sees it that way, and most people cannot even make themselves do so. A more striking example:
FIGURE 4
The Law of Proximity: a more extreme case
Here one sees lines made up of three closely spaced dots, tilted slightly to the right of the vertical; one does not see, and can see only with difficulty, an alternative structure—lines made up of three widely spaced dots, tilted far to the left of the vertical.
Similarity: When similar and dissimilar objects are mingled, we see the similar ones as groups:
FIGURE 5
The Law of Similarity: a simple example
The similarity factor can, in fact, overcome the proximity factor. In the left-hand box below, we tend to see four groups of closely spaced objects; in the right-hand box, two sets of dispersed but similar objects.
FIGURE 6
The Law of Similarity: a more complex example
Continuation or direction: In many patterns, we tend to see lines that have a coherent continuation or direction; this is why we are able to pick out a meaningful shape from a bewildering background, as we do in “hidden figure” puzzles. Such a line or shape is a “good Gestalt”—one with inner coherence or inner necessity. In this pattern, for instance, we can force ourselves to see two curved pointed figures, AB and CD, but what we tend to see is the more natural Gestalt of two intersecting curves, AC and BD. The factor of continuation can be astonishingly powerful. Consider these figures—
FIGURE 7
The Law of Continuation: two curves or two pointed shapes?
FIGURE 8
Two figures, easily seen as distinct
and now this one, a merger of the previous two:
FIGURE 9
The same figures, now visually inseparable
It is virtually impossible to see the originals in the merged figure because of the dominance of the continuous wavy line.
Prägnanz: The related English word “pregnancy” does not convey Wertheimer’s meaning, which is “the tendency to see the simplest shape.” Much as physical laws cause a soap bubble to assume the simplest possible