Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism (German: Gestalt [ɡəˈʃtalt] "shape, form") is a philosophy of mind of the Berlin School of experimental psychology. Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies. The assumed physiological mechanisms on which Gestalt theory rests are poorly defined and support for their existence is lacking. The Gestalt theory of perception has been criticized as being descriptive of the end products of perception without providing much insight into the processes that lead to perception. In the introduction of a recent special issue of the journal Vision Research on Gestalt perception, the authors concluded that "even though they study the same phenomena as earlier Gestaltists, there is little theoretical coherence. What happened to the Gestalt school that always aspired to provide a unified vision of psychology? Perhaps there is, in fact, little that holds the classic phenomena of Gestalt psychology together."

This principle maintains that when the human mind (perceptual system) forms a percept or "gestalt", the whole has a reality of its own, independent of the parts. The original famous phrase of Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, "The whole is other than the sum of the parts" is often incorrectly translated as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts", and thus used when explaining gestalt theory, and further incorrectly applied to systems theory. Koffka did not like the translation. He firmly corrected students who replaced "other" with "greater". "This is not a principle of addition" he said. The whole has an independent existence.

In the study of perception, Gestalt psychologists stipulate that perceptions are the products of complex interactions among various stimuli. Contrary to the behaviorist approach to focusing on stimulus and response, gestalt psychologists sought to understand the organization of cognitive processes (Carlson and Heth, 2010). The gestalt effect is the capability of our brain to generate whole forms, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of global figures instead of just collections of simpler and unrelated elements (points, lines, curves, etc.).

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