Perception - Gestalt...

It is commonly known that our own vision about the world is based on five basic senses such as: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing but it is also an additional one: kinesthetic sense which informs us of the position of our body and movements of parts of the body (Cassels, 1991). The process of creation our vision is called perception. According to Anette Cassels book(1991): Perception involves the taking in of information, through our senses, and then processing that information to make meaningful sense of it all. Many scientist have been doing researches about that topic since ancient times. They were aware of human’s brain complicity. In late 1930s a group o psychologist called Gestalt raised many questions about the most known type of perception – visual. Wertheimer, Koffka and Koehler proved that people use number of principles to by which they organize isolated part of a stimulus into groups or whole objects. These are: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and common fate.

Quoting http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~kbroom/Lectures/gestalt.htm website:

Proximity:

The principle of proximity or contiguity states that things which are closer together will be seen as belonging together.

Similarity:

Similarity means there is a tendency to see groups which have the same characteristics so in this example, there are three groups of black squares and three groups of white squares arranged in lines.

The principle of similarity states that things which share visual characteristics such as shape, size, color, texture, value or orientation will be seen as belonging together.

Continuity:

The principle of continuity predicts the preference for continuous figures. We perceive the figure as two crossed lines instead of 4 lines meeting at the center.

Closure:

Related to principle of good continuation, there is a tendency to close simple figures, independent of continuity or similarity. This results in a effect of filling in missing information or organizing information which is present to make a whole

Common fate:

Suppose both principles of proximity and similarity are in place - then a movement takes place - the dots begin to move down the page. They appear to change grouping.

A few other examples of visual perception: