Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [199]
The central Gestaltist doctrine, that the whole—the Gestalt— is greater than the sum of its parts and that it dominates our perceptions has stood the test of time and testing. In one recent experiment, psychologist David Navon measured the time it took observers to identify large and small letters in a display like this:
FIGURE 14
The “Forest Before Trees” Effect: It takes longer to identify the tiny letters than the bigger ones they make up.
The Gestaltists 347
Observers were able to name the large letters more swiftly than the small ones, whether or not the small ones were the same as the large ones they made up; in contrast, it took them longer to name the small letters when they were different from large ones made up of them.48 Evidently, the whole was recognized more easily than the parts it was made of.
Prägnanz, the tendency to see the simplest shape in complex patterns (see Figure 10, page 328), has held up as a valid perceptual principle. So has grouping (the Laws of Proximity and of Similarity, illustrated above on pages 326 and 327), although later research has extended and somewhat modified it.49
As for problem solving, although the reward-based, trial-and-error model espoused by behaviorism remains valid for many simpler animals, research with more intelligent animals and human beings has followed the direction taken by Köhler, Duncker, and Wertheimer. Newer models, based on information-processing theory, do not contradict Gestalt problem-solving theory so much as provide detailed programs of the step-by-step reasoning and searching for which Gestalt psychology had only such vague terms as “restructuring.”50
Gestalt psychology also significantly deepened the study of memory. The work of Ebbinghaus and his followers with nonsense syllables revealed certain of its principles, but only within the narrow confines of the meaningless. Gestalt psychology restored a perspective in which the broader aspects of memory could be investigated—the web of meanings into which we weave new material and through which we locate and recall desired information.51 Recent work on memory has gone far beyond Gestalt explanations but along the same lines.
Most important, the Gestaltists restored consciousness and meaning to psychology; they did not discredit the findings of Wundt’s followers or the behaviorists so much as radically enlarge the scope and dimensions of scientific psychology, re-establishing within it mind and all its processes—including, according to Koffka, meaning, significance, and value. As he said:
Far from being compelled to banish concepts like meaning and value from psychology and science in general, we must use these concepts for a full understanding of the mind and the world.52
In 1950, when Gestalt psychology was losing visibility as a distinct school, Edwin Boring summed up its fate in terms that have not been improved on:
Schools can fail, but they can also die of success. Sometimes success leads to later failure. [Gestalt psychology] has produced much important new research, but it is no longer profitable to label it as Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology has already passed its peak and is now dying of its success by being absorbed into what is Psychology.53
Forty years later, that valuation was reiterated by two perception researchers, Irvin Rock and Stephen Palmer, who were extending and revising Gestalt theories of perception in cognitive science terms:
The list of major perceptual phenomena [the Gestaltists] elucidated is impressive. In addition, they were victorious over the Behaviorists in their clash regarding the nature of learning, thinking and social psychology. Although behavioral methods are adhered to by modern psychologists, Behaviorist theory has been abandoned in favor of a cognitive approach more in line with Gestalt thinking. The theoretical problems they raised about perceptual organization, insight, learning and human rationality