, considered to be Gestalt psychology’s founder, was born in Prague in 1880 and studied at the University of Frankfurt. Here he became aware of a form of apparent motion, known as the . The phi phenomenon is experienced when an observer notices that two lights, within close proximity to each other and flashing alternately, appear to be one light moving back and forth to and from both locations. The observer perceives movement, even though none has occurred. This concept is called apparent motion, and is thought to occur because we perceive experiences in a way that calls for the simplest explanation, even though it may differ with reality. This is known as the Gestalt law of Minimum Principle: …”we do not perceive what is actually in the external world so much as we tend to organize our experience so that it is as simple as possible…simplicity is a principle that guides our perception and may even override the effects of previous experience.” (Benjafield, p. 173). Explaining apparent motion in this way marked the beginning of Gestalt psychology as a separate school of thought.
Gestalt psychology can be understood by experiencing the , which describe the ways we organize our experiences in a simple and coherent way. These laws are:
Proximity: We tend to group things together that are close together in space.
Similarity: We tend to group things together that are similar
Good Continuation: We tend to perceive things in good form
Closure: We tend to make our experience as complete as possible
Figure and Ground: We tend to organize our perceptions by distinguishing between a figure and a background
Gestalt psychology had a pervasive effect on many different areas such as learning, ethics, and social psychology. It philosophized that learning is most effective when students learn generalizations and principles that can be applied to new situations, as opposed to rote memorization that is more of a conditioned response than actual learning. , a physicist and Gestalt scholar, documented applications of this when he was stranded in the Canary Islands during World War I. Kohler observed a , Sultan, who was a part of scientific station there, use sticks as tools to gather fruit that was just out of reach outside of his cage. Kohler was impressed that Sultan developed his entire scheme as soon as he discovered the sticks and used the term insight to describe this spontaneous restructuring of the situation. In another experiment, Kohler observed chickens trained to peck at a gray board when it was presented with a black board, transferred this learning by pecking at a white board when it was presented with a gray board. Instead of the chickens only learning a single task, they learned to associate the reward (corn) with the board that was lighter, showing that they understood the relationship between the stimuli. This is known as transposition, and is applied to humans, as in the generalization of knowledge from one situation to another.
Kohler also developed the concept of : that changes in the brain structure yield changes in our experiences. Originally, Kohler believed that these changes were a one-to-one match. Although this idea was later disproved, the idea remained that the brain is a dynamic system.
Gestalt’s approach to ethics consisted of a philosophy of truth on being truth when it is complete and corresponds fully to the facts of the situation. With the Gestalt approach, there would be no mistrials based on technicalities or semantics.