Gestalt Principles of Perception
“Gestalt” (from “shape” or “form”) is the concept of seeing the whole before its parts; and/or the whole being more than the sum of its parts
Gestalt Psychology was founded by Max Wertheimer starting from the initial observation that we perceive motion where there is nothing more than a rapid sequence of sensory events (e.g. lights flashing on and off along a string giving the perception of movement of light along that string even if nothing actually moves)
Key Ideas
Emergence
- Form complex patterns from simple rules
- People identify elements first by general form
- Simple, well-defined objects communicate more quickly than detailed objects with difficult-to-recognise contours
Reification (Filling in the Gaps)
- Perceiving an object as containing more spatial information than is present
- We pull from familiar patterns in memory, to fill in gaps of what we think we should see
- Designers can leave elements out as long as enough is provided to fill in the gaps
Multi-Stability (Avoiding Uncertainty)
- The tendency of an ambigious perception to move unstably between different interpretations
- E.g. optical illusion
- You can’t perceive both simultaneously, so you bounce between stable alternatives
- One will tend to be dominant, which will eventually override the other, makingit harder to see
Invariance (Recognising Similarities and Differences)
- We recognise (simple) objects independent of rotation, translation, and scale
- We’re used to perceiving objects from different perspectives
Key Principles
- Figure/Ground
- Area
- Similarity
- Uniform Connectedness
- Continuation
- Closure
- Proximity
- Common Fate
- Symmetry
- Parallelism
- Common Region
- Past Experience
- Law of Focal Point
- Law of Prägnaz