PSYCH 1XX3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Gestalt Psychology, Udder, Emergence
14 Aug 2020
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Gestalt philosophy that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. German psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s believed this with regards to perception. That people perceive the whole stimulus rather than each individual part. Reaction to the structuralist approach (that everything could be reduced to basic elements) How motion is an emergent property of a sequence of pictures. Gestalt principles proposed laws to describe how we organize visual input. We are either born with these laws of organization (grouping tendencies), or we acquire them very rapidly. Figure-ground the ability to distinguish an object from its background in a visual scene. A figure tends to have distinct borders/edges that give it a perceptible form, contrasting with the background which is usually formless or made up of multiple forms. Sometimes may be confusing if cues aren"t clear. Proximity elements close together in space tend to belong together.
