Gestalt Psychology

Modified: 2025-02-10 8:08 PM CST

• The antecedents to Gestalt psychology mostly centered around the phenomenon of melody and attempts to explain it.
  • Ehrenfel’s concept of gestalt quality presaged the later definition of a gestalt. Other early work included Mach’s explanation of the Doppler Effect and his discovery of Mach Bands. Wertheimer’s description of the phi phenomenon put Gestalt psychology on the map as did his elucidation of the Gestalt principles of perception
• From the beginning, Gestalt psychologists considered themselves as scientists attempting to discover causal relationships between gestalts and underlying physiological mechanisms.
  • They also borrowed freely from physics appropriating concepts such as force fields, isomorphism, and field theory.
  • Wertheimer’s early research on mathematical thinking was an example of cross-cultural psychology.
• Gestalt psychology was broad in its approach going beyond perception to include learning (human and animal), thinking, and social psychology.
  • Köhler’s research on insight learning and transposition, Zeigarnik’s work on memory, Wertheimer’s book on thinking, and Lewin’s and Asch’s social psychological studies all testified to the breadth of Gestalt psychology.
• Gestalt psychology lives on in 21st century psychology; one just has to know where to look.
• If you can answer Wertheimer's question below, then you will have a good idea about what Gestalt psychology is all about.
  • A hunter sees a bear one mile due south of where the hunter is standing. He aims a gun at the bear, shoots, and misses. The hunter next walks the one mile due south to where the bear was when the shot was fired, then walks one mile due east, then one mile due north—and ends up standing at exactly the same place from which the gun was shot . . . What color was the bear? (answer is below)

• The history of Gestalt psychology is inextricably linked with the history of Germany in the early 20th century.
  • Gestalt psychology, however, did not spring up fully formed.
  • William James’s stream of consciousness and Stumpf’s research on music had already argued against Wundtian elementism.
  • The work of Ernst Mach and Christian von Ehrenfels in the 19th century was foundational.
  • Both of them were struck by the persistence of musical melodies and each attempted to provide theoretical explanations as to why melodies could not be decomposed meaningfully into individual notes.
  • Ehrenfels’s Gestaltqualitäten inspired Wertheimer to investigate and, later, to found Gestalt psychology proper.
• Max Wertheimer conducted the first research explicitly judged as Gestalt psychology when he examined the mathematical thinking of the Veddas.
  • But it was his research of the phi phenomenon and the Gestalt principles of perception that caused others to first notice the emergence of a new school of psychology.
  • Wertheimer, along with Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, formed the initial nucleus of Gestalt psychology.
    
• Köhler became famous for his research on insight learning and transposition in apes.
  • Later, he chaired the psychology department at the University of Berlin, the most important center of Gestalt psychology.
  • The rise of Hitler and Nazism put an end to Gestalt psychology in Europe and most of its researchers emigrated, many to the United States.
• While still in Germany, Koffka taught at the University of Giessen.
  • Tolman visited him there twice and served as an early conduit of gestalt ideas to American psychology.
  • Koffka moved to the United States and wrote the first book about Gestalt psychology to be printed in English.
  • Unfortunately it was a difficult read. That work and an earlier article he wrote left the mistaken impression that Gestalt psychology only applied to perceptual psychology. That impression still lingers today.
    
  • Wertheimer and Koffka died prematurely, limiting their potential long-term effect on psychology.
• Nevertheless, a newer generation of Gestalt psychologists did emerge.
  • Kurt Lewin had been a colleague of Köhler and Wertheimer at Berlin.
    • After Hitler became chancellor, Lewin chose to remain in the United States where he had served as a visiting faculty member at Stanford.
    • Because he was Jewish it was not safe for him to return home.
    • Lewin became a prominent social psychologist. But, he, too, died an early death. He pioneered topological psychology, researched leadership, and attempted to find ways to reduce prejudice.
      
  • Solomon Asch emigrated to the United States from Poland.
    • He was trained in the behaviorist model but fell under the influence of Wertheimer.
    • Asch, too, was a social psychologist.
    • He conducted research on impression formation, suggestibility, and opinion change.
    • His textbook on social psychology was well received.
    • His most famous research was on opinion change. He arranged a laboratory situation in which a naïve subject was subjected, at times, to intense social pressure to conform to an obviously incorrect decision on a perceptual task made by several other strangers.
      
  • In many ways, Gestalt findings persist in 21st century psychology.
    • The phi phenomenon and the Gestalt principles of perception are covered in every general psychology textbook.
    • Current research in cognition acknowledges its debt to Gestalt psychology.
    • For example, Morgan et al. (2019) analyzed the role that expectations played in melody comparing gestalt ideas to modern statistical learning theories. They concluded (p. 31):
      
      • "Our finding that both statistical learning and Gestalt-like principles influence melodic expectations raises a new question: what sort of cognitive process might combine these two types of knowledge in determining melodic expectations? Broadly speaking, we envision two possible types of answers: in one case, statistical learning and Gestalt-like principles operate independently, and then their predictions are combined. In the other case, these two types of principles might in fact emerge from a single system."
        
  • Thus, gestalt psychology still influences modern cognitive psychology.
    • The unanswerable question always is: What would psychology be like today had Gestalt psychology been allowed to flourish in its European home?
  • Oh, what about Wertheimer’s bear? It was white. (Hint: there is only one spot on the world where the conditions in the problem could take place. The gestalt, of course, ties that spot to the bear.)
    
    
  • Glossary
    • gestalt: a unified whole that cannot be predicted from summing its component parts. Gestalts may be perceptual, cognitive, or social.
    • Doppler Effect: the phenomenon first discovered by Christian Doppler in 1842 where a constant sound emanating from a moving object changed its pitch as it approached or receded from a stationary observer.
    • Mach Bands: the illusion created in a visual stimulus when an abrupt change in color or brightness creates illusory light or dark lines next to each band.
    • force field: a region surrounding a magnet or electric current influencing other objects or fields without actually coming into physical contact with them.
    • aphasia: loss of the ability to speak or to comprehend spoken language following a brain injury.
    • tachistoscope: a device that can display visual stimuli for extremely brief periods.
    • Insight Learning: a type of learning in which a solution to a problem appears suddenly, usually after a period of time has passed since the problem was first presented.
    • transposition: learning the relationship between two stimuli and subsequently transferring that learning to other pairs of stimuli.
      field theory: the physical theory that describes the movement of objects when influenced by forces such as electricity or magnetism.
    • Zeigarnik Effect: the finding that people are much more likely to remember uncompleted tasks than completed tasks.
    • Topological Psychology: Lewin’s approach to psychology that used diagrams to symbolize and explain the relationships of variables such as learning, motivation, and tension on behavior.
  • Gestalt Theory
    • Gestalt psychology began by proposing a new way to understand sensations and perceptions.
      • Wertheimer’s discovery of the phi phenomenon was the principal originating event.
      • Within a short span of years, Gestalt psychology began to provide new explanations for learning and thinking.
      • In the United States, Lewin and Asch extended Gestalt ideas into social psychology, group dynaics, and conformity.
      • For a variety of reasons: displacement from Germany, resistance from Neobehaviorism, the premature deaths of Wertheimer and Koffka, and the small number of graduate students produced, Gestalt psychology all but faded away.
      • Yet, many of its principal ideas live on in modern psychology.
      • Wertheimer’s principles of gestalt perception and Köhler’s insight learning are prominent examples.
    • Here are some contemporary examples:
      • Koontz and Gunderman (2008) argued that radiologists must practice gestalt perceptual principles daily as they make diagnoses based upon radiographic images.
      • More recently, Wang et al. (2018) proposed using deep learning techniques based on gestalt psychological principles to detect breast masses in mammograms.
      • Similarly, Westheimer (1999) pointed out that a long-standing gestalt finding—contour salience or how edges of stimuli are perceived—is now being explained via mathematical algorithms.
      • Sharps and Wertheimer (2000) urged psychologists to heed Gestalt psychology’s perspective and take domain specificity into account in their theoretical formulations.
        • They also emphasized the importance of “interchanges between organisms and surroundings as determinants of behavior” (p. 315).
    • Guberman (2016) reviewed gestalt theory and its search for a neurophysiological basis for its findings and argued (p.235):
      
      • Before we thought that perception starts with sensations and finishes with Gestalt – the pure product of mind. Now we see that (at least in communication tasks) the percept is embodied in our physical body. The perception will change dramatically if our body changes.
    • Gestalt psychology is yet present in the 21st century and is still developing theoretically and being applied in new areas, especially in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
      • Guberman (2018) reviewed AI’s early dismissal of psychophysical research and its embrace of logic as a model of human thinking.
        • Only recently, he noted, have psychology and AI rediscovered Wertheimer’s fundamental notion of the gestalt, one presaged by the analysis of melody by Ehrenfels and Mach, supported by neurological research of brain damaged victims, by the discovery of mirror neurons, and by incorporating the motoric elements of speech and handwriting perception.
        • What emerged is a (p. 10) “rearranged Gestalt theory [21] on the basis of a single principle, equipped with well-defined notions, and covering all Gestalt phenomena - just as Wertheimer wanted it to be.”
      • Pizlo (2008, p. 28), writing about the rediscovery of gestalt principles in AI and machine vision noted,
        • “Unfortunately, the Gestalt psychologists did not elaborate on the relation between shape perception and figureground organization. This oversight probably explains why they did not do much to advance the study of shape perception.” Later (p. 60), he wrote:
        • In short, we perceive the 3D world as 3D, rather than as 2D, not because the 3D interpretation is simpler, which it may very well be, at least on some occasions, but because it is a smart thing to do. [original italics]
    • This claim spells out the main difference between the Gestalt and the cognitive approach to perception.
      
    • Gestalt principles are still being used profitably in modern psychology and in computer science.

Kardas on Gestalt

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