Gestalt Principles: How Do We Organize What We See?
Gestalt principles are rules that explain how our brain organizes stimuli and what we see. These principles help us understand why we see things as we do. They are about the idea that the whole is something more than the sum of its parts.
A few psychologists established these principles, including researchers from the Gestalt Therapy Institute of Cologne, such as Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. These psychologists worked in a laboratory to demonstrate how the human brain organizes the information and images it sees throughout the day.
Thus, these new Gestalt principles replaced the idea that emotions are the result of a simple sum of individual pieces or images. As I said, these principles say that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
To simplify our world
If our brain did not reduce the complex stimuli to something more understandable, the world would be too great a challenge for us to do our tasks adequately. Ironically, psychologists discovered that the process of simplifying the world requires significant perceptual effort on the part of the brain.
Perception gives meaning to the world and what we see
Let’s take a look at the following photos:
Most of us have a laid back attitude when it comes to painting a picture about ourselves.
We can also say that you can find four pipes in the picture above.
In the previous figure we see a square or a diamond in two lines.
Are they the only interpretations we can come up with? A person with all his thoughts and ideas can argue that there are three angles in the first figure. There are eight vertical lines in the second and a “W” over an “M” in the third.
The Gestalt idea of ​​perception emphasizes how we interpret individual elements in a scene as a complete and unified whole. This view is based on the assumption that the organized whole is somewhat different and in fact larger than the sum of its individual parts.
Gestalt principles for grouping what we see
Basic perception processes operate according to a number of principles. These principles describe how we organize pieces and proportions of information into meaningful entities.
These processes are called the Gestalt principles of grouping. A group of German psychologists who dedicated themselves to studying patterns presented these principles in the early twentieth century. They were able to find valid principles of importance for visual and auditory stimuli. Here are these principles:
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This principle dictates that we usually group when it comes to closed or complete figures, instead of open figures. Therefore, this means that we tend to ignore discontinuities and concentrate on general forms.
Proximity
We tend to group elements that are close to each other. As a result, we tend to see letters instead of single dots, as in the following image:
Similarity
We tend to group items that share a similar look. This is why we see rows of identical apples instead of columns of different shapes in the following image.
Simplicity in what we see
In a general sense, the overriding Gestalt principle is the law of simplicity. When we see a pattern, we perceive it in the most basic and direct way possible.
In the following picture we can see the hands as a Y. This is done in accordance with the principle of simplicity where the brain “inserts” what is easier to understand.
When it is surrounded by the image of the other letters, our brain tells us that the hands create the letter Y. However, the law of proximity is also at stake since the pieces consisting of the Y are among other letters. We can also think of the principle of equality because the colors in the picture are the same and there are no curved lines.
As we see, these Gestalt principles are extremely important if we are to understand how we perceive images. We organize stimuli in such a way that we give images meaning according to these different principles. This explanation is based on the fact that the brain needs to simplify what it perceives to make it more understandable.
