History of the Gestalt Laws
Have you noticed how alternately flashing lights, such as neon signs or strands of lights, can look like a single light that was moving back and forth? This optical illusion is known as the phi phenomenon. Discovered by German psychologist Max Wertheimer, this illusion of movement became a basis for Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology focuses on how our minds organize and interpret visual data. It emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. Based upon this belief, Wertheimer along with Gestalt psychologists Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, developed a set of rules to explain how we group smaller objects to form larger ones (perceptual organization). They called these rules the Gestalt Laws. In the image at the top of this page, for example, you probably see two separate groupings of colored circles as rows rather than just a collection of dots. In the image at the top of the page, the circles on the left appear to be part of one grouping while those on the right appear to be part of another. Because the objects are close to each other, we group them together. In the image at the top of the page, you probably see the shape of a diamond because your brain fills in the missing gaps in order to create a meaningful image. Look at the last image at the top of the page. The circles are right next to each other so that the dot at the end of one circle is actually closer to the dot at the end of the neighboring circle. But despite how close those two dots are, we see the dots inside the circles as belonging together. It is important to remember that while these principles are referred to as laws of perceptual organization, they are actually heuristics or shortcuts. Heuristics are usually designed for speed, which is why our perceptual systems sometimes make mistakes and we experience perceptual inaccuracies.
