Week 5: Gestalt Effects & Schema Theory

Q.2: Name three laws of Gestalt Theory and provide examples to illustrate your point.

            According to Lester, (2006, p.51) “The word gestalt comes from the German noun that means form or shapes.” Gestalt is known with the statement of “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.” (Bourne, Dominski & Loftus, p.22).

This statement means that people organize a structure as a whole and not from its parts. As an example, the figure shown below:

Figure 1

In figure 1, it shows that people can still see the letter “I” which is missing in the word. This is because people read the word as a whole and not one by one according to the alphabets. According to Solso (1995, p.121), “Gestalt psychologists proposed the perception of visual patterns to be organized according to the principles of proximity, similarity, and spontaneous organization.”

There are five laws of gestalt theory, which are, the law of similarity, law of proximity, law of continuity, the law of common fate and the law of figure ground or pragnanz and the law of closure. However, only three of these principles will be explained in this post, which is the law of similarity, the law of proximity and the law of closure. In addition, the examples for the principles of gestalt will be provided according to each law.

The first law of gestalt is the law of similarity. According to Haberlandt, (1997, p.108), “we group stimuli that are close or similar to each other.” It means that people tend to view things according to their similarity. For example, in the figure below:

Figure 2

In figure 2, it shows that the squares and circles are grouped according to the similarity of the shapes. Another example for similarity is shown in the figure below:

Figure 3

In figure 3, the image shows that the black and white squares are grouped according to their similarity.

The second law of gestalt is the law of proximity. This law of proximity is when people tend to perceive things as a group rather than the separated parts. In figure 4 below, it shows that the dots are actually the same in number when people count them but some people will think that the separated dots are lesser than the grouped dots. This shows that people perceived the dots which are closer and which are formed as a whole and the dots which are farther apart from each other are seen as unrelated together.

Figure 4

Another example for the law of proximity is the image shown in figure 5 below:

Figure 5

In figure 5 above, when people view the image as a whole, they can see the image of a tree. However, if a person perceives the image above as a separated group, it shows that there is an image of a person who is putting their hands up which are grouped together to form an image of a tree.

The third law is the law of closure. According to Solso, (1995, p.92), “Some patterns of stimuli seem to be classified the same way by many people.” People tend to complete the objects which are incomplete. For example, in figure 6:

Figure 6

In figure 6, it shows dots which looks as a partially complete circle. In addition, it shows that the human’s brain is able to fill in the missing information to make it as a complete circle. Another example of closure is shown in the figure below:

In figure 7, it shows the image of a giraffe. This is because, the human brain can easily see the image of a giraffe due to the areas which are nearly complete, or there are units which can be seen as close together.

In conclusion, for gestalt theory, any objects, shapes and thing are grouped together and are seen as a whole.  The law of similarity tends to explain that objects, shapes or things are be grouped together according to their likeness and similarities. Whereas, the law of proximity, according to Cassells & Green, (1991, p.15), is the "elements of a stimulus will be perceived as belonging together if they appear to be close together." Moreover, in the law of closure, objects, things or shapes can be simply perceived automatically by the brain because of its closeness. The Gestalt psychologists, such as Koffka and Kohler state that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." (Cassells & Green, 1991, p.14)

References

Bourne, Lyle, E., Dominski, L., Roger, & Loftus, F., Elizabeth, (1979), Cognitive Processes, p.22, Prentice- Hall Inc. Englewood Cliffs, USA

Cassells, A., & Green, P., (1991), Cognitive Processes: Perception, p.14-16, The British Psychological Society, St. Andrews House, UK

Haberlandt, K., (2^nd ed.)., (1997), Cognitive Psychology, p.108, A Viacom Company, USA

Lester, P.M., (4th ed.)., (2006), Visual Communication: Images with messages, p.51, Cencage Learning, USA

Solso, Robert L., (4^th ed.)., (1995), Cognitive Psychology, p.92-121, A Simon & Schuster Company, USA