Gestalt Psychology

The scope of Gestalt psychology goes beyond its origins in research on perception. The founder of the Gestalt school, Max Wertheimer, invested much of his energies in other topics, such as epistemology (Wertheimer 1934), ethics (1935), problem solving (1920), and creativity (1959/1978; see also Duncker 1945/1972; Luchins 1942). Koffka, one of Wertheimer's foremost collaborators, devoted more than half of his Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935) to attitudes, emotion, the will, memory (see also Wulf 1921; Restorff 1933), learning, and the relations between society and personality (see also Lewin 1935; Dembo 1931/1976). Köhler, the third member of the leadership of the Gestalt school, did research on the insightful problem-solving of apes (1921/1976) and wrote about ethics (claiming that value is an emergent property of situations) and requiredness (1938), which anticipates Gibson's notion of AFFORDANCES.

After the dismantling of German psychology -- beginning with the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 -- American psychology, dominated by doctrinaire BEHAVIORISM, was disdainful of cognitive ideas and saw Gestalt psychology as outmoded and suspiciously vitalistic. These suspicions were reinforced by the views of some Gestalt psychologists about the way the brain creates Gestalts, views that seemed to have been spectacularly refuted (for a summary, see Pomerantz and Kubovy 1981). It was perhaps for this reason that during this period, the influence of Gestalt psychologists -- many of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany -- on American psychology was felt mostly in social psychology (e.g., Lewin 1951; Heider 1958/1982; Krech and Crutchfield 1948) and psychology of art (e.g., Arnheim 1974, 1969), which were not under the control of behaviorists and were not concerned with brain theory (Zajonc 1980).

During the eclipse of Gestalt psychology as cognitive psychology, some of the questions posed by the Gestalt psychologists were kept alive by Attneave (1959), Garner (1974), Goldmeier (1973), and Rock (1973). A more general revival of these questions took place in the early 1980s with the publication of three edited books: Kubovy and Pomerantz (1981), Beck (1982), and Dodwell and Caelli (1984).

Gestalt psychology can be characterized by four main features: (1) its method: phenomenology; (2) its attitude towards REDUCTIONISM: brain-experience isomorphism; (3) its focus of investigation: part-whole relationships; (4) its theoretical principle: Prägnanz (Pomerantz and Kubovy 1981; Epstein and Hatfield 1994). Let us consider these features one by one.

Phenomenology. The application of phenomenology to perception involves a descriptive text laced with pictures (exemplified by GESTALT PERCEPTION, and Ihde 1977). According to Bozzi (1989: chap. 7), a conventional psychological experiment (in any field of psychology) differs from a phenomenological experiment in the way summarized in Table 1. This comparison shows how close phenomenological research is to protocol analysis, the use of verbal reports as data, often used in research on problem-solving (Simon and Kaplan 1989: 21-29). In recent years some psychologists have confirmed and elaborated results obtained with the phenomenological method by using more conventional experimental methodology (Kubovy, Holcombe, and Wagermans forthcoming). Phenomenology as practiced by the Gestalt psychologists should not be confused with introspectionism as practiced by early psychologists such as Titchener (cf. INTROSPECTION). In fact, in its methodological assumptions, introspectionism is closer to contemporary experimental psychology than to phenomenology. Any account of the introspectionists' methods (Lyons 1986) will confirm that they are well described by Bozzi's six features of conventional psychological experiments (Table 1).

Table 1 Comparison of conventional and phenomenological experiments (after Bozzi 1989; chap. 7)

Brain Theory. Despite the refutation of the specifics of the Gestalt psychologists' brain theory, their search for specific correspondences between experiences and brain events and their idea of brain fields anticipated important current foci of research (e.g., NEURAL NETWORKS and massively parallel processing). Köhler (1947: 132-133) predicted that future psychological research would study "dynamic self-distribution. . . which Gestalt Psychology believes to be essential in neurological and psychological theory," whose "final result always constitutes an orderly distribution," that is, a "balance of forces" (p. 130; this is a statement of the principle of Prägnanz, discussed below). It is impossible to read this prophecy without thinking of Hopfield networks and Boltzman machines, that can be thought of as minimizing a system energy function (Anderson 1995; Kelso 1995).

It should be noted that for all their emphasis on brain theory, the Gestalt psychologists did not think of themselves as nativists (Köhler 1947: 113, 117, 215). They were nevertheless vigorously opposed to the behaviorists' empirism (a psychological metatheory that gives primacy to learning theories; to be carefully distinguished from the epistemological theory of empiricism).

Part-whole relationships. The problem of part-whole relationships, which is currently under vigorous investigation in perception, was first discussed by Christian von Ehrenfels, in a seminal essay "On 'Gestalt Qualities'" (1988) written twenty-two years before Wertheimer's (1912a) first discussion of the subject. He is the one who first asked, "Is a melody (i) a mere Zusammenfassung of elements, or (ii) something novel in relation to this Zusammenfassung, something that. . . is distinguishable from the Zusammenfassung of the elements?" (p. 82). Although Zusammenfassung has usually been translated as "sum," this translation may have led to confusion because the notion of Zusammenfassung is more vague than the word "sum" suggests. The word means "combination," "summing-up," "summary," "synopsis," that is to say, "sum" as in the expression "in sum," rather than as an arithmetic operation (Grelling and Oppenheim 1939/1988: 198, propose the translation "totality").

Consider the tune Row Your Boat. The melody is different from the following Zusammenfassung: "10 Cs, 3 Ds, 7 Es, 2 Fs, and 5 Gs," because the duration of the notes is important. The melody is also different from a more detailed Zusammenfassung (if the time signature is ): "1 × <C, 6>, 2 × <C, 2>, 1 × <C, 2>, 6 × <C, 1>, 3 × <D, 1>, . . ." where 2 × <C, 3> means two tokens of C whose duration is equivalent to three eighth notes, because the order of the notes is important. But even the score -- which specifies the notes, their duration, and their order -- does not capture the melody. The tune could be transposed from the key of C to the key of F#, and played at a faster tempo so that it would share no pitches and no absolute durations with the original version. It would still be the same tune. What is preserved are the ratios of frequencies (musical intervals) and the ratios of durations (rhythm). Melody is a property of the whole that depends on relationships among the elements, not on the elements themselves. According to von Ehrenfels, the Gestalt is a quality one perceives in addition to perceiving the individual elements. It was Wertheimer who reformulated this idea of the Gestalt as a whole embracing perceived elements as parts.

Figure 1 Three ways to apply Prägnanz to the perception of shape. For each of these ways, the smaller the "correction" to the "schema," the greater the Prägnanz of the shape. Originality: A shape can be seen as a transformed prototype: a parallelogram can be seen as a skewed rectangle. Integrity: A shape can be seen as an intact shape ("rectangle") modified by a feature or a flaw: "rectangle with a bump," "rectangle with one side missing." Lawfulness: A hard-to-name irregular shape can be said to be roughly rectangular in form.

Brain Theory. Despite the refutation of the specifics of the Gestalt psychologists' brain theory, their search for specific correspondences between experiences and brain events and their idea of brain fields anticipated important current foci of research (e.g., NEURAL NETWORKS and massively parallel processing). Köhler (1947: 132-133) predicted that future psychological research would study "dynamic self-distribution. . . which Gestalt Psychology believes to be essential in neurological and psychological theory," whose "final result always constitutes an orderly distribution," that is, a "balance of forces" (p. 130; this is a statement of the principle of Prägnanz, discussed below). It is impossible to read this prophecy without thinking of Hopfield networks and Boltzman machines, that can be thought of as minimizing a system energy function (Anderson 1995; Kelso 1995).

Prägnanz. The notion of Prägnanz (introduced by Wertheimer 1912b) is of great importance to the understanding of cognition. Textbooks define Prägnanz as the tendency of a process to realize the most regular, ordered, stable, balanced state possible in a given situation. This notion is illustrated by the behavior of soap films, which are laminae of minimal potential energy. Unconstrained, a soap film becomes a spherical bubble, but when constrained by a wire, the film takes on a graceful and seemingly complex shape (Hildebrandt and Tromba 1985: chap. 5). But the standard definition of Prägnanz ignores an important difference between physical and cognitive systems. Physical systems are exquisitely sensitive to the exact form of the constraints: small changes in the constraints can make a big difference to the shape of the soap film. In contrast, cognitive systems are relatively insensitive to the details of the input, because they decompose it into a schema that has Prägnanz, to which a correction is added to characterize the input (Woodworth 1938: chap. 4). Cognitive systems have several ways to extract Prägnanz from inputs (Rausch 1966 -- summarized by Smith 1988 -- proposed seven of them). Here are five of them (the first three are exemplified in figure 1): (1) Lawfulness: extract the part of an event or an object that conforms to a law or a rule. (2) Originality: extract the part of an event or an object that is a prototype (in the sense currently used in theories of the structure of CONCEPTS) with respect to other events or objects. (3) Integrity: extract the part of an event or an object that is whole, complete or intact, rather than partial, incomplete or flawed. (4) Simplicity: extract that part of an event or an object that is simple or "good." (5) Diversity: extract that part of an event or an object that is "pregnant," that is, rich, fruitful, significant, weighty.

Figure 2 A puzzle that is hard to solve because of Prägnanz.

Much of the work of Gestalt psychologists on obstacles to PROBLEM SOLVING has implicated Prägnanz. For example, if the six pieces shown in figure 2 are scattered in front of you, and you are asked to make a square out of them, you are likely to start by forming a disk -- a good form that delays the solution (Kanizsa 1979: chap. 14).

See also

• EMERGENCE
• GIBSON, JAMES JEROME
• ILLUSIONS
• RECURRENT NETWORKS

Additional links

• Classics in the History of Psychology -- Koehler (1959)
• Classics in the History of Psychology -- Wertheimer (1923)
• Contents of The Gestalt Therapy Page Web Site
• Gestalt Archive
• Gestalt Theory: Links to Gestalt Related Sources: Perception

-- Michael Kubovy

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