Things that are similar are perceived to be more related Consider how we recognise a bicycle, rather than a collection of handlebars, wheels, spokes, saddle, and so on. Simply put: we appreciate and recognise objects we see as wholes, rather than seeing them as their individual parts. Gestalt psychology is described as “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. From these studies, a set of theoretical principles were formed, known as the Gestalt Principles of Perception. They studied how humans make meaningful perceptions, and especially how we group things and create relationships in what we see around us. Gestalt psychology was established in the early twentieth century by three psychologists. Let’s take a look at five principles, and see how they can help design better interfaces. Two additional Gestalt principles are the law of continuity (or good continuation) and closure.Gestalt Principles of Perception explain how we visually perceive and make sense of the world around us.Īs designers we can use these principles to inform how design elements are placed, and how they can create meaningful groups of things. We are grouping these dots according to the principle of similarity. When looking at this array of dots, we likely perceive alternating rows of colors. When watching an offensive drive, we can get a sense of the two teams simply by grouping along this dimension. For example, when watching a football game, we tend to group individuals based on the colors of their uniforms. According to this principle, things that are alike tend to be grouped together (Figure 3). We might also use the principle of similarity to group things in our visual fields. Here are some more examples: Cany oum akes enseo ft hiss entence? What doth es e wor dsmea n? We group the letters of a given word together because there are no spaces between the letters, and we perceive words because there are spaces between each word. For example, we read this sentence like this, notl iket hiso rt hat. How we read something provides another illustration of the proximity concept. The Gestalt principle of proximity suggests that you see (a) one block of dots on the left side and (b) three columns on the right side. This principle asserts that things that are close to one another tend to be grouped together, as Figure 2 illustrates. The concept of figure-ground relationship explains why this image can be perceived either as a vase or as a pair of faces.Īnother Gestalt principle for organizing sensory stimuli into meaningful perception is proximity. Presumably, our ability to interpret sensory information depends on what we label as figure and what we label as ground in any particular case, although this assumption has been called into question (Peterson & Gibson, 1994 Vecera & O’Reilly, 1998). As Figure 1 shows, our perception can vary tremendously, depending on what is perceived as figure and what is perceived as ground. Figure is the object or person that is the focus of the visual field, while the ground is the background. According to this principle, we tend to segment our visual world into figure and ground. One Gestalt principle is the figure-ground relationship. As a result, Gestalt psychology has been extremely influential in the area of sensation and perception (Rock & Palmer, 1990). Gestalt psychologists translated these predictable ways into principles by which we organize sensory information. In other words, the brain creates a perception that is more than simply the sum of available sensory inputs, and it does so in predictable ways. The word gestalt literally means form or pattern, but its use reflects the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. This belief led to a new movement within the field of psychology known as Gestalt psychology. Wertheimer, and his assistants Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, who later became his partners, believed that perception involved more than simply combining sensory stimuli. In the early part of the 20th century, Max Wertheimer published a paper demonstrating that individuals perceived motion in rapidly flickering static images-an insight that came to him as he used a child’s toy tachistoscope.
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