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Introduction to Gestalt psychology

by EMoore

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The best way to explain Gestalt psychology is motion pictures. A sequence of events flying by so fast they are not seen but known. Thus Gestalt Psychology is the theory is that things are often experience out of the ordinary.

Gestalt Psychology is the study of perception. Ideas and thing we know but we actually don't see. A simple illustration of perception multiple pictures all the same except each succeeding one would be advanced ever so slightly. With enough of these a cartoon of a dog could be seen walking or wagging his tale. An advanced type is carried to completion is Microsoft's Power Point presentations. (Technology having taken the chore of drawing by hand each minute interval.)

Max Wertheimer was the founder of Gestalt psychology. The word itself means a meaningful whole. In other words one minute fraction of this meaningful whole' in itself would be nothing but put together it becomes an action, an activity, it becomes something perceived.

Actually what is seen is an illusion, not the real thing. It is possible, Max Wertheimer explained, to see illusions, that is seeing the effect of the whole action and not the sum of its parts.

The laws that govern Gestalt Psychology are:

(1.) The law of pregnancy. Not pregnancy that produces a child, but pregnant with thought, it was explained. Examples are dots outlining a circle or a star or some other shape and without hesitation the human mind will perceive the whole although there will be missing parts.

By that we could conclude that if there are too many missing parts, then our perception is lacking. I base that conclusion on children's coloring books where you connect the numbers. Often there is not enough information and one cannot perceive what the final picture will begin. With such scanty fore knowledge all we have to go on is the placement of the numbers and these most likely will give us a false picture. In order to get the right one we will have to follow instructions.
Yet in the above mental diagram we perceive in what order we follow one to two and to three and on.

(2) The second law is The Law of Closure: We add the missing parts. We have stored perceptions in our minds that adds information here.

(3) The law of Similarity: We tend to group things of a like nature together. This law is used in basic learning situations where a child will come home from school with homework where there to mark things that have a commonality. It can be the shape, square, round, or perpendicular, or it could be different


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