...Influences of Gestalt psychology were Immanuel Kant’s study on the focuses of perception as a whole, Ernst Mach’s influence of sensation thinking, and Christin von Ehrenfel’s further exploration and experimentation on Mach’s sensations theory. Max Wertheimer studied Ehrenfel’s work and used it as the bass for his movement of the Gestalt theory. In addition, the two other founders of Gestalt psychology, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler, studied elements of consciousness and artificial abstractions that furthered Gestalt research and movement. “After Wertheimer initiated the studies on the perception of apparent movement, Gestalt psychologists seized on other perceptual phenomena. The experience of perceptual constancies afforded additional support for their views” (Schultz, 2011, p. 271). The idea of perceptual constancy is having completeness and or wholeness not very even if information is missing. Gestalt psychology is theory of the mind being so complex and dynamic that sensory elements such as vision and sound interact in order to fill in missing information that is perceived by an individual who is perceiving the information given. The founders of Gestalt psychology explain perceptual and a few defining principles. The first law is similarity, meaning items are perceived as being together such as forming a group. For example, if an individual were to see a group of squares and circles the law similarity would allow the individual to group the squares and circles separately...
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... Gestalt Psychology Gestalt psychology is best describe as a school of thought which looks into the human mind and behavior as a whole. The main idea behind Gestalt psychology is that the human mind considers objects as a whole before, or in parallel with, a perception of their individual parts. Many Gestalt psychologists believed that all mental experience was not only dependent on just a specific combination of elements. They were also dependent patterns and organization of an individual experience of perceptions. Founded by three German psychologists in 1910 Wolfgang Kolhler, Kurt Koffka, and Max Wertheimer had many contributions to the discipline. It began with the brilliant work of Max Wertheimer in response to the Wilhelm Wundt structuralism Gestalt psychology became establish. This development of psychology help inspires many individuals such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, and Ernst Mach. Gestalt psychology had many contributions to the discipline, especially with Gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy specifically focuses on helping an individual raise their senses, feelings, and needs. Helping individuals expand their boundaries as well all while contributing to a person overall self-respect and well-being. Emphasizing on making strong connections, respectful meetings and establish great contact. Lewin's theory states that an individual is part of the community and should not be isolated. According to Gestalt principles...
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...Gestalt Psychology Amber Havener PSY 310 October 14, 2014 K. Hathaway Gestalt Psychology Early development of psychology have been traced back to the initial idea of Wundt and later on elaborated on by Titchener. Gestalt psychology focused primarily on the nature of Wundt’s work. Gestalt approached Wundt’s ideas with complete opposition. Wolfgang Kohler, psychological facts consist of unrelated inert atoms…thus introduce action are association”. Early influences of Gestalt psychology consist of many different elements. Such as, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) he has implied that when we see what we call objects we come in contact with mental states that are composed of bits and pieces. To Kant these elements are organized in the mind the process of perceiving will occur or a creation of a whole experience. Perception is not a combination of sensory elements, but more an active organizing of elements into a coherent experience. The mind gives shape to the raw, uncut data of perception. Fraz Brentano proposed that psychology was studying the act of experiencing. Brentano opposed Wundt’s interest on the elements of conscious experience, he thought that Wundt’s introspection was a more direct observation of an experience that occurred. Ernst ach pushed for a more direct influence on Gestalt psychology. Mach was more interested in geometric figures and patterns, such as, melodies. An example of this would the space form of a circle. Even if the space form of the circle was black...
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...Gestalt Psychology Reflection Yanko Abreu PSY 310 February 15, 2016 Dr. Fine Gestalt Psychology Reflection Psychology has always been an ever evolving discipline, popular ideas are constantly thought up and either disproved or developed. Early to mid-twentieth century the United States had become home to the behaviorist school of thought. Being able to conduct experiments in order to further ideas was more important than simply speculating on thought process. Behaviorism had essentially broken down thought to simple stimuli and reaction. This however way not the only school of thought at the time. In Germany, psychologist were having issue with this oversimplification of the human mind. There were those who believed that the mind could not be looked at as just the sum total of its parts this was to be known as Gestalt psychology. Instead the mind had to be studied as a whole in order to fully understand it, especially in regard to the more complex thought processes (Goodwin, 2015). The idea was sound but creating observable experiments to test many of the theories was beyond the capabilities of the time. This was a vulnerability that other psychologist would often exploited. Gestalt psychology stemmed from many different areas of study to include philosophy, physics, and even music. The idea that things had to be studied as a whole instead of its parts was in line with some of the concepts that these other areas were looking into at the time. Music played a surprising...
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...Gestalt Psychology Reflection Michael A. Perkins PSY310 January 26th, 2015 Dr. Shannon Kelly Gestalt Psychology Reflection The Gestalt psychology movement was fascinating within the time frame in which it started to develop. While other psychological movements strived to boil down psychology in almost simplistic, scientific terms, Gestalt psychology embraced complexities within the consciousness. Gestalt psychologists argued “that when we look out a window we really see trees and sky, not individual sensory elements such as brightness and hue” (Schultz & Schultz, 2011). There is more to what we experience and see that just the simple elements that make these things and experiences up. Gestalt psychology owes much of its beginnings to the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant (Schultz & Schultz, 2011). Kant believed that experiences were created not from association, but through the perception of those experiences (Schultz & Schultz, 2011). There is a certain level of individuality in this statement, as individual perception is not something that can be simply classified in a way that was satisfactory to a more scientific model. For me, seeing the color green immediately leads me to reflect upon my grandmother and my great deal of pleasant experiences and memories. My perception of the color green, therefore, is wholly distinct from a simplistic explanation of the hue or tone of the color. Another interesting influence of Gestalt psychology was physics professor...
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...Gestalt Psychology Reflection Gestalt Psychology Reflection Gestalt psychology is known as the school of thought. It looks within human thought processing and human behavior as a whole rather than separately. The mind's ability to process and interpret the world. Gestalt psychology was formulated by the original works of Max Wertheimer and provided a substantial amount of information to formulate Wilhelm Wundt's theory of structuralism partially. Other contributors to Gestalt psychology are; Johann Wolfgang von Goeth, Ernst Mach, and Immanuel Kant. (Cherry, 2015) Gestalt psychology is also known as gestaltism and was continually referenced for idealists who were not in favor of Wilhelm Wundt's theory of structuralism. Gestaltism brought new understanding of what human abilities were capable of in terms of meaningful perceptions amongst complicated scenarios or ambitious world views. Max Wertheimer wrote, "There are holes, the behavior of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes" (Cherry, 2015) Wertheimer saw Gestaltism as a rapid sequence of perceptual events. An example of this would be rows of flashing lights creating an illusion of an event in motion. This is also known as phi phenomenon, something that the movie field has processed into still pictures being presented...
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...Gestalt psychology reflection Paper Barrie Bogatov Psy/310 14 March, 2015 Since its inception, psychology has taken many twists and turns from the theories of Skinner, Thorndike, experiments from Watson, Pavlov etc. and from them we have learned a great deal. Nevertheless, according to Schultz & Schultz (2012) “at approximately the same time the behaviorist revolution was gathering strength in the United States, the Gestalt revolution was taking hold of German psychology” (Schultz & Schultz, 2012 pg 262). When it comes to Gestalt psychology, one can say that this field had many influences from many different founders with many different views and theories. Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Ernst Mach, and Kurt Koffka are some of the ones that had a huge impact on the development of Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology as we know is “the study of perception and behavior from the standpoint of an individual's response to configurationally wholes with stress on the uniformity of psychological and physiological events and rejection of analysis into discrete events of stimulus, percept, and response” Max Wertheimer was a young scholar who was going to school to study law. But during his time at the University of Prague he decided to change his major to a field of study that he found rather interesting and that field was philosophy and psychology. As per different students, who took his lectures or had been to his office said that the way he saw...
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...The Gestalt psychologists maintained that when people perceive sensory elements their tendency is to see things in terms of the entire form or pattern rather than as individual parts. Identify and describe these basic principles of perceptual organization from the Gestalt perspective: figure-ground, similarity, proximity, and closure. Gestalt psychology was based on the study of perception. Gestalt is a term that means whole. Gestalt physiologists argued that we perceive as a meaningful and complex object, not a series of independent parts. In other words, we perceive any stimulus field as a simplified, balanced, and organized whole. For example, in the perception of letters with missing parts consciousness seeks to fill in this gap, and we recognize the whole letter. The wholeness of perception and its orderliness is achieved through the following principles: figure-ground, similarity, proximity, and closure. Figure-ground is a lot illusions are based on this principle. In a picture we can see either faces or a vase, or either a young or old woman. The illusion is based on gestalt when we focus on the figure from the background. The figure is what comes forward and what make sense for us; the background is what we ignore and what does not come to our consciousness. Similarity is people’s visual perception always tends to classify similar objects the same; therefore, objects with similar characteristics whether size, color, shape, or brightness are perceived as...
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...PSY/310 History and Sytems in Psychology Katrin Ramos One of the main influences on Gestalt psychology was the strength of the behaviorist revolution and its happening during the same time that Gestalts revolution was staking its claim in Germany psychology. This was a way to protest against the psychology of Wundtian. The inspiration for the new viewpoints and the grounds for launching the new systems of psychology were because of the protests of Wundt’s work spuring further testimony. During the attack on the establishment of psychology, the elementistic nature of Wundt’s work is the inspiration of for Gestalt to primarily focus upon it. Gestalt’s psychologists argued in opposition of Wundt’s foundation of his work; the sensory elements. This created the main idea of Gestalt’s psychology which is that our minds think in a whole process of self organizations. The contributions to the development is how our senses are capable of visual recognition of things in a whole form and not just simple lines and curves. The psychology formed in part by a reaction to the atomism of the structuralist school of thought. This which was based on the focus of breaking down mental processes. Breaking down the mental process was done until it was in their smallest forms. The psychologist believed that behavior must be studied in all of its complexities instead of being separately or divided. This was because they believed that mental experiences were not simple combinations of elements...
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...Gestalt Psychology Reflection PSY 310 January 11, 2016 Sam Ivory Dr. Fine Gestalt psychology Reflection The school of thought is what Gestalt psychology theory is about. Gestalt believes that all things and scenes are observed in the simplest forms. Also known as the 'Law of Simplicity,' the meaning behind the theory is that the whole of an object or scene is more important than its individual parts. When you observe everything as a whole it allows us to us find order in disorder and unity among outwardly unrelated parts and pieces of information (Cherry, 2015). Gestalt theories have implications for education focusing more meaningful learning and true understanding of principles, over the traditional structured approaches based on memory and recall (King, Wertheimer, Keller & Crochetiere, 1994). Gestalt psychology gave a unique way on human perception. According to Gestalt psychologists, you don't just see the world; what you see, depending on what you are expecting to see. The reason behind Gestalt psychology is that it encourages people to 'think outside of the box' and to look for patterns. Another contribution to Gestalt psychology is the development of our senses is capable of visual recognition of things as a whole and not just simple line and curves (Schamber, 1986). However the breakdown of the mental process wasn’t done until it was in their smallest forms. The psychologist believed that behavior must be studied in all of its complexities instead...
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...Introduction Are people too lazy to recycle? Or maybe they are just heartless beings, and could care less if the Earth became heavily polluted. But a more realistic reason as to why people don't recycle or even think about doing so is because of the Law of Proximity. The Law of Proximity simply states that when objects appear close to one another they tend to be perceived as a group. In this case, both the garbage and recycling bins are one group. But before we continue on about our experiment, some scientific background is needed in order to fully comprehend our experiment. The Law of Proximity is actually a subcategory to a much larger law. The bigger law being the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization. This specific principle can be translated to convenience since whatever group that is being perceived is being formed on the basis that they are near one another. thus logically forming a group. A better explanation for this would be to use an example from a scientific observation from the 1950's at MIT. Researchers were studying friendship formation by asking 300 MIT students to list down their closest friends. Shockingly, the researchers quickly found out that The Law of Proximity applied to how people chose their friendships. During their research they noticed that if someone lived one door away, there was a 41% chance they were listed as a close friend. However, as the number of doors increased, the likelihood decreased such as those people living four doors away...
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...Aaron Pomerleau Mr. Hiatt Psychology 3 April 2014 Is it true? Look at an optical illusion and you may think you're seeing things, such as a curved line that's actually straight, or a moving object that's standing still. You wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you. But you can’t help but thinking, could it be real? It's not all in your eyes. An illusion is proof that you don't always see what you think you do because of the way your brain and your entire visual system perceive and interpret an image. Visual illusions occur due to properties of the visual areas of the brain as they receive and process information. Your perception of an illusion has more to do with how your brain works and less to do with the optics of your eye. Everything that enters the senses needs to be interpreted through the brain, and these interpretations occasionally go wrong. Illusions, may serve as a test to determine whether scientists understand vision correctly. When light hits our retina in the eye, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates that into a visual perception of the world. Our brains compensate for this neural delay and so it attempts to generate an image of what it will perceive one-tenth of a second in the future. Optical illusions occur when what our brains predict does not match the reality. A better way to think of it is in order to compensate for this massive loss of information and provide us with visual perceptions that are rich in contrast...
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...unning head: GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY Gestalt Psychology Theory Abstract The formation of the gestalt movement. The founding fathers of gestalt theory, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler and their focus in the movement. Gestalt therapy explained by the laws and the theory of personality. How the gestalt theory is in effect today. Gestalt Psychology Theory The three pioneers of the Gestalt Theory, Max Werthmeimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. All three focused on different aspects that have continued to develop across multiple disciplines throughout the 2oth Century. Gestalt theory focused on the mind’s perceptive processes (Kearsley, 1998). The word gestalt has no direct translation into English, but “describes a configuration or form that is unified. A gestalt may refer to a figure or object that is different from the sum of its parts. Any attempt to explain the figure by analyzing its parts results in the loss of the figure’s gestalt” (Brennan, 2003). In simpler terms” A way a thing has been ‘placed’, or ‘put together’”; common translation includes “form” and “shape” (Myers, 1998). Zakia, 1997, described gestalt by saying,”…what you experience when you look at a picture is quite different from what you would experience if you were to look at each item that is in the picture separately”. Wertheimer was born in Prague in 1880 (The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001). He studied at the Universities of Prague, Berlin and Wurzburg, receiving...
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...Antonia Mcman-McCline Vision Light and Color 11/1/14 Cognitive Illusions & Double Exposures Cognitive Illusions can be broken up into various groups of illusions such as, distorting illusions, ambiguous illusions, paradox illusions. I will create an ambiguous illusion using photography as my medium. The illusion will consist of a triple exposure creating three images working together as one. Each exposure setting requires an f-stop in other words the aperture. The aperture controls how much light is let into the lens before the photo is taken. Using multiple exposures f8, f5.6, and f3.5 creating variations of light. My tools consisted of an Argus C3 50mm film camera, black & white film and one light source. The exposures work together creating a beautiful perspective that works along with darks and lights. This causes the viewer to try and figure out which image was taken first and which was last. This ambiguous illusion forms a multistable perception. A multistable perception is the occurrence of an image being able to provide multiple, although stable, perceptions (Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik). Visual illusions are defined by the dissociation between the physical reality and the subjective perception of an object or event. The picture is interpreted as representing a three-dimensional structure...
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... there have been many people and innovations in the psychiatric world that have spurred from him. One of those innovations was the Gestalt Theory by Fredrick S. Perls. The background behind Perls and his theory, an analysis of what his theory was and what it did, and how it is still used today, is what is focused on in this paper. Fredrick S. Perls created the Gestalt Theory in the 1940’s and continued to have an influence on culture through the 1950’s. His main interests in existenalism and Eastern religions, and Gestalt psychology contradicted what his Freudian training had taught him, but in the end led him to his well-known Gestalt Theory. “Perls saw the human being as a unified organism, an integration of mental, physical, emotional. And sensory processes expressed in the present moment” (Irving B. & Craighead, 2010). A lot of Perls work had been influenced by Kurt Goldstein, a neurologist, Moreno’s social experimentation, field therapy by Kurt Lewin, and ideas derived from Zen (Gaie, 2003). His theory focused on the less shy and submissive idea of feelings and brought up the value of the client/patient dynamic and the effectiveness of facing the problem head on. Even though all the people and therapy’s listed above had an influence on Perls, he was able to mesh all of what he had learned together beautifully into his own. The Gestalt Theory that was created by Fredrick Perls is a theory that focuses on self-acceptance and taking responsibilities for one’s own actions...
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