THE GESTALT THEORY

The Gestalt Theory



The Gestalt Theory

Introduction

The Gestalt movement in psychology began early in the twentieth century; its founders were the German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. A Gestalt is essentially an organized whole whose parts belong together, as opposed to being simply juxtaposed or randomly distributed. As Wertheimer put it, "What happens to a part of the whole is determined by intrinsic laws inherent in this whole." The Gestalt theorists believed this principle of straightforward application and to be relevant to the psychology of perception in particular (Attneave, 1959).

History

As early as 1890 Christian Von Ehrenfels had pointed out that to appreciate a melody we need to be aware, not of single tones in isolation but of a succession of tones which combine in a way. If notes of the same pitch as those of the original melody are presented in a different temporal order, there will be a completely different effect, whereas the same melody played in a different key is immediately recognizable, even though the notes are different in pitch from the original ones. The melody as a whole was said by Von Ehrenfels, to have a Gestaltqualität independent of the qualities of the separate notes. Wertheimer, Köhler, and Koffka were concerned to apply the concept of Gestalt over a wide area and thus give a new direction to psychological research.

Figure 1

A central feature in their view was the doctrine of isomorphism, which asserts that our experiences have the same structure as the brain processes which underlie them. Thus, if the stimulus is a nearly complete circle, which the subject sees as a complete circle, the doctrine of isomorphism would assert that there must be some pattern in the brain that is isomorphic with the complete circle, as opposed to the incomplete one. The detailed neurological hypotheses, which they put, onwards are of questionable value, but the general principle is still of interest, as is Köhler's demonstration that there are Gestalten in "physical" nature. For example, the soap bubble, whose spherical shape is the necessary result of the total forces in operation at any one time (see Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, p. 14).

The following are some typical examples of the Gestalt principle as applied to vision: Figure 1 appears as a cross; if; however, we consider the effect on the retina of the eye of each of the dots in isolation, there is nothing to account for the way in which they are organized. Implicit in conventional thinking, according to Köhler and Koffka, is the presumed constancy hypothesis—the hypothesis that stimulation of a point on the retina has a sustained effect regardless of the total pattern of stimulation (Ducker, 1945).

If, the constancy hypothesis were true, it would be hard to explain the obvious recognizably of the "4" in Figure 2a and its camouflage in Figure 2b, since the same retinal points are being stimulated in both cases. Similarly, one cannot explain how a person who moves from twenty yards away to ten yards ...