Gestalt Ideas Research Articles

The Gibsonian movement and Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology

In recent decades, several ecologically inclined authors have adopted the Gestalt idea of demand characters. Yet, James Gibson, the founder of the ecological approach, although being inspired by Koffka, was critical of many of his ideas, including the contention that the environment calls for certain actions. This article examines why Gibson was so reluctant to accept this concept of demand characters. To that end, the relationship between Gibson’s ecological approach and Gestalt psychology is scrutinized. After an exploration of the parallels between the frameworks of Gibson and Koffka, Gibson’s critique of Koffka’s masterpiece Principles of Gestalt Psychology is evaluated. It is argued that although Gibson’s claim about the mind–world dualism in which Koffka’s perspective is rooted is arguably valid, neither Gibson nor some of his recent devotees take Koffka’s insights into the qualities of experience sufficiently seriously in their theorizing.

Next-Generation Sequencing in Cancer.

In this article, we provide a gestalt idea about NGS technologies and their applications in cancer research and molecular diagnosis. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) advancements like DNA sequencing and RNA sequencing allow uncovering of genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic scenes of individual malignant growths. An assortment of genomic abnormalities can be screened at the same time, for example common and uncommon variations, auxiliary variations like insertions and deletions, copy-number variation, and fusion transcripts. NGS innovations together with bioinformatics investigation, which extend our insight, are progressively used to analyze multiple genes in a cost-effective way and have been applied in examining clinical cancer samples and offering NGS-based molecular diagnosis. NGS is progressively significant as a device for the diagnosis of cancers.

Spatial Aesthetics: Art as Transformative Experience in Thomas Hardy's “Poems of 1912-13”

Landscape, is something to be perceived with eyes, to be dwelled upon and to experience happiness. Getting an eyeful of places give a seasoning and spatial joie de vivre. There is more than eyes can espy, more than ears can detect. Settings and views are waiting to be explored. Things are in relation to surroundings, the sequences of events lead up the experiences and memories. The kind of vision appears in Thomas Hardy’s “Poems of 1912-13.” “Poems of 1912-13” are a series of elegies that Hardy composed after his wife Emma Gilford’s eternal rest. Although the couple had long been set at odds, howbeit, Hardy embarked on his writing adventure about Emma. He unexpectedly made a hit with the memories of their love; wherefore, the “Poems 1912-13” are personification and reproduction of Hardy’s mind. He defined the two real physical places where Emma and he used to live, id est, Cornwall and Dorset, not only as social but also psychological spaces. He inwardly overhauled and restored the spaces once familiar to him. Over and above, he dreamed up and brought his imaginary into existence with his late wife. As Hardy waved through the mental space and moved over the space of time, he also made the spaces emblematic and figurative like memorials. Like the idea of Gestalt’s theory, the couple’s life experiences are “essences or shapes of an entity's complete form.” Both the poet and the phantom (Emma) become flâneur, the stroller in Walter Benjamin's meditation on nineteenth-century Paris, who is a characteristic and exemplary figure of freshness modernity.

Training Generalists in Higher Education: Its Theoretical Basis and Prospects

Aim/Purpose: Absence of new scientific approaches and specialists (generalists), who professionally obtain such approaches, is one of the main reasons for an ineffective solution of complex multifactor problems of the modern society. Background: The article briefly describes the concept of systems transdisciplinary integration of knowledge of different scientific disciplines. Also, it shows an opportunity to use this concept education of generalists in higher education. Methodology: The article highlights the idea of gestalt of knowledge, which is based on systems transdisciplinary model of spatial unit of order. It describes the basis of gestalt-of-the-one and gestalt-of-the-whole. Also, it explains the differences and practical capabilities of holist generalists and unicentrist generalists. Contribution: Loss of identificational attributes can take place during the process of integration of knowledge of different scientific disciplines. The article shows how to avoid this complication within a systems transdisciplinary approach. Findings: Each type of fundamental knowledge has its own carriers, such as scientists and specialists. Therefore, direct interaction of people-carriers of fundamental knowledge has limited potential. Presently, a more practical importance is the interaction between scientists and specialists within the zones of hybridization of fundamental knowledge. Hybridization is the process of systematization of knowledge within specialized systems transdisciplinary models of unit of order. A specialist generalist’s professional work is to organize scientific research, systemise knowledge of different scientific disciplines, make necessary conclusions, and suggest optimal solution for complex multifactor problems. Therefore, generalists should be considered as an important move towards the solution of complex multifactor problems of modern society. Recommendation for Researchers: A new scientific approach is a way of widening scientific worldview. A new approach in inorganic chemistry made it possible to create the Mendeleev periodic table of elements. Owing to this table, researchers were able to learn the characteristics and attributes of chemical elements, which can be found in nature. Also, models of systems transdisciplinary approach allow the discovery of new elements and relations of complex multifactor problems. Its absence would, however, hinder the research and the problem description. Future Research: The article justifies that preparation of generalists in higher education is one of the main peculiarities of universities of the third generation. Therefore, it might be desirable for organizers of higher education and university leaders to begin speculations regarding this quest, develop educational programs for generalists, and search for optimal forms and methods of solution.

Gestalt-like constraints produce veridical (Euclidean) percepts of 3D indoor scenes

This study, which was influenced a lot by Gestalt ideas, extends our prior work on the role of a priori constraints in the veridical perception of 3D shapes to the perception of 3D scenes. Our experiments tested how human subjects perceive the layout of a naturally-illuminated indoor scene that contains common symmetrical 3D objects standing on a horizontal floor. In one task, the subject was asked to draw a top view of a scene that was viewed either monocularly or binocularly. The top views the subjects reconstructed were configured accurately except for their overall size. These size errors varied from trial to trial, and were shown most-likely to result from the presence of a response bias. There was little, if any, evidence of systematic distortions of the subjects’ perceived visual space, the kind of distortions that have been reported in numerous experiments run under very unnatural conditions. This shown, we proceeded to use Foley’s (Vision Research 12 (1972) 323–332) isosceles right triangle experiment to test the intrinsic geometry of visual space directly. This was done with natural viewing, with the impoverished viewing conditions Foley had used, as well as with a number of intermediate viewing conditions. Our subjects produced very accurate triangles when the viewing conditions were natural, but their performance deteriorated systematically as the viewing conditions were progressively impoverished. Their perception of visual space became more compressed as their natural visual environment was degraded. Once this was shown, we developed a computational model that emulated the most salient features of our psychophysical results. We concluded that human observers see 3D scenes veridically when they view natural 3D objects within natural 3D environments.

'of all things a face appeared': Reading Faces in Samuel Beckett's That Time

In his study of psychology in the 1930s, Samuel Beckett registered a number of ideas regarding the face. He took note of the Gestalt idea that the baby is born with the innate ability to distinguish the figure of a face from a blurry buzzing background. His interest was also piqued by the finding that one's perception of a facial expression might change depending on how much of the face is made visible. These ideas would influence his later work. Focusing on the short play That Time, this article looks at Beckett's dramatic presentation of a face alone in the dark. It compares Beckett's approach to face-reading with the study of the face that developed in twentieth-century experimental psychology. Beckett, I suggest, is working with the idea, common in experimental psychology, that facial expressions can be produced involuntarily and perceived effortlessly. However, he also draws attention to a more effortful mode of producing and perceiving faces. Finally, the article situates Beckett's portrayal of the face in relation to a modern culture that increasingly recognises – and celebrates – the face's unmanageability, but has not stopped attempting to manage the face.

Spatial structure of contextual modulation

Contextual effects are ubiquitous in vision and provide a means for detectors with localized receptive fields to encode global properties of a stimulus. Although the nature of the neural connections is complex, the majority of evidence supports the Gestalt idea of collinearity; interactions are greatest when the target and surround orientations are spatially aligned to form a contour. Here we create a novel stimulus that simultaneously probes all areas around a detector to determine which spatial positions influence perception in human observers. We find that the surrounding spatial areas that contribute most to contextual effects for our perception of orientation and motion are not confined to a specific location. Rather our results reveal that human perception displays some interobserver variability in the weighting of detector interactions that is largely independent of collinear structure. We propose that these more extensive surround stimuli reveal how complex visual structure may modulate performance in a manner that is not easily predictable using more conventional stimuli.

Vygotsky’s idea of Gestalt and its origins

The origins of Vygotsky’s conception of Gestalt in Goethe, Hegel, and Marx is traced, demonstrating how this concept not only forms a methodological foundation for Vygotsky, but also is the key concept through which this series of thinkers has overcome various forms of dualism. Vygotsky’s use of the concept in his unfinished work on child development is reviewed and it is shown how this conception of Gestalt sheds new light on the concept of the zone of proximal development.

Perceptual organization and neural computation

Our present understanding of perceptual organization has its roots in the observations and qualitative principles of the Gestalt psychologists. Gestaltists and their associates identified and classified phenomena that reflect how perceptual systems derive representations of the environment based on fragmentary information and stimulus context. A broad range of phenomena was explored in this early work. The perceptual organization of visual motion was a major focus, involving both simple (Korte, 1915; Ternus, 1926; von Schiller, 1933; Wertheimer, 1912) and complex (Duncker, 1929; Musatti, 1924; Rubin, 1927; Wallach, 1935) motion patterns. The perceptual organization of static form was explored in studies of part-whole relationships in simple planar figures (Rubin, 1915; Wertheimer, 1923), and later in studies of illusory contours and amodal completion (Kanizsa, 1955; Michotte, 1964). Additional topics included lightness and color phenomena (Benary, 1924; Gelb, 1929; Katz, 1935; Wallach, 1948), and the perception of events (Michotte, 1941). In brief, the research areas addressed by the first generations of Gestalt psychologists spanned much of what is now vision science. The broad impact of Gestalt ideas is reflected in the exceptional scope of this special issue. This early work provides a rich source of observations and intuitions about mechanisms underlying various aspects of perceptual organization. Building on this foundation, current work is revolutionizing our understanding of perceptual organization in two major respects. First, the qualitative observations and descriptions generated by early work are now replaced by rigorous computational theories. This advance can be traced through a

Ambiguity, logic, simplicity, and dynamics: Wittgensteinian evaluative criteria in peer review of quantitative research on categorization.

Research on categorization has changed over time, and some of these changes resemble how Wittgenstein's views changed from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to his Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein initially focused on unambiguous, abstract, parsimonious, logical propositions and rules, and on independent, static, "atomic facts." This approach subsequently influenced the development of logical positivism and thereby may have indirectly influenced method and theory in research on categorization: much animal research on categorization has focused on learning simple, static, logical rules unambiguously interrelating small numbers of independent features. He later rejected logical simplicity and rigor and focused instead on Gestalt ideas about figure-ground reversals and context, the ambiguity of family resemblance, and the function of details of everyday language. Contemporary contextualism has been influenced by this latter position, some features of which appear in contemporary empirical research on categorization. These developmental changes are illustrated by research on avian local and global levels of visual perceptual analysis, categorization of rectangles and moving objects, and artificial grammar learning. Implications are described for peer review of quantitative theory in which ambiguity, logical rigor, simplicity, or dynamics are designed to play important roles.

Waves of visual awareness

The old Gestalt idea that perception is driven by the dynamics of electromagnetic fields in the cerebral cortex seems to be alive and well in recent studies of visual awareness, as exemplified by the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. When different images are presented to the two eyes, they are not perceived simultaneously but one image dominates over the other. This dominance not only alternates between the images, but appears to spread in waves (examples of stimuli can be found at http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/blake/rivalry/waves.html). Hugh R. Wilson and colleagues [Nature (2001) 412, 907–910] have recently presented psychophysical evidence that these phenomenal waves are generated by physical waves spreading in primary visual cortex. Wilson et al. trigger waves by abruptly increasing the contrast of one of the images; then, by having subjects indicate the arrival time of the wave at different points, they can measure the speed of propagation. They found that dominance waves travel faster along lines that are collinear than along lines that are merely parallel – echoing the fact that neurons with collinear preferred orientations have stronger excitatory connections, which would be expected to give rise to faster wave propagation. Furthermore, by enlarging the stimuli so that they fall on regions of visual cortex where images are compressed, it is found that speed of propagation depends on cortical distance, rather than on distance in the image. These and other results, confirmed by a simple network model, strongly support the hypothesis that physical waves in visual cortex lead to phenomenal waves of visual awareness. MW

The Primary Risk

In the Tavistock tradition, we understand an organization by first identifying its primary task. We ask, what is this organization set up to do, how is it organized to accomplish this objective, and what unconscious dynamics limit or distort its members' ability to do their work? This approach while powerful, does not help us understand organizations that live at strategic junctures in their life cycles. In these situations, the task is to choose a task. We need a conceptual framework to help us understand the psychodynamics of organizing and deciding in these situations. The following article develops the concept of the "primary risk' to explain how organizations behave in these situations. It links the primary risk to the psychoanalytic idea of ambivalence and the gestalt idea of the figure/ground relationship. It draws on case material to illuminate its concepts.

The Theory and Practice of Assertion Skills: An Applied Gestalt Approach

"Summary: The wilful application of Gestalt ideas and practices has, in the present study, made standard assertion training techniques more effective and provided a ground of theory. Of particular value are recognition 1) that assertive behaviour is on acontinuum of behaviour, between the poles of being passive or aggressive, 2) that knowledge of the stages of figure development can be a valuable guide to action, 3) that criticism is a negative, self-defeating form of comment, 4) that anxiety and panic can be dealt with physiologically by attention to breathing habits, 5) that attention to group-dynamics and 6) working with role play situations from real life leads to learning and changed behaviour. Key words: aggression, anxiety, assertion, criticism, Gestalt, group, passivity, role play."

Katrina de hirsch: An appreciation

A collection of brilliant and stimulating papers by Katrina de Hirsch has recently been published as a monograph by The Orton Dyslexia Society, under the title Language and the Developing Child, de Hirsch is an internationally recognized authority in the field of lan guage disorders. The publication dates of these papers span the years from 1950 to 1982 and the journals in which they have appeared cover a broad range of academic disciplines: for example, Pediatrics, The British Journal of Disorders of Communication, The Journal of Genetic Psychology, The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, The Journal of Mental and Nervous Diseases, The Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, and Annals of Dyslexia. The bibliography of over 400 titles is a treasure in itself. Her writing is always scholarly, often entertaining, and almost startlingly succinct. For example, "The printed page is a time chart of sounds and words." Her discussions of theory are illuminated by vivid case his tories, the sophistication of which indicates the extent of her clinical experience. Describing a dyslexic 8-year-old, she says "Martin is blond, slight and has a charming face, but he looks as if he were not quite finished." Several themes, many of them adapted from gestalt theory, run through the papers in this collection. As de Hirsch and Jansky state in their important article on patterning and organization deficits, classical gestalt theory was limited to visual phenomena. Werner and Strauss (1941) explained, however, that the theory is applicable to higher processes. The gestalt ideas of structure and pattern put forth by Lauretta Bender (1938) in relation to visuomotor functioning are ap plied by de Hirsch and Jansky to language behavior. They look at language and its disorders, especially dyslexia, within the framework of the organization of behavior as a whole. Manifestations of imma turity, plasticity, and inadequate differentiation and organization are seen in the oral and written language of many dyslexic children. de Hirsch points out that "these same children often show primi tive and fluid motor behavior, unstable perceptual experiences and

Gestalt psychology in the soviet union

The influence of the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology on Soviet psychology in the period before the ‘reactological debate’ (1931) is analyzed. A review of the channels of communication (congresses personal visits, translations, review papers) shows that Soviet psychologists were well informed about Gestalt psychology, and that the members of L.S. Vygotskij's circle were the main promotors of Gestalt ideas in the Soviet Union. Gestalt psychology was welcomed as a potential ‘ally’ in the construction of a Marxist psychology first outlined by K.N. Kornilov. The initial enthusiasm for Gestalt psychology was stimulated by the system concept as developed by Wolfgang Kohler, and A.R. Luria made an attempt to demonstrate the compatibility between Kohler's theory and some general methodological implications of dialectical materialism. Later on, the focus of interest shifted to Kohler's investigations of intelligent behavior in apes, which formed part of the empirical base of the ‘historico-cultural theory of mental development’. The impact of Gestalt ideas served an important function in the struggle against mechanistic theories of behavior which were at that time predominant in Soviet psychology.

Deindividuation: Effects of group size, density, number of observers, and group member similarity on self-consciousness and disinhibited behavior.

Predictions about the social causes of self-consciou sness in groups were derived from the theory of deindividuati on and tested in three experiments. In Experiment 1 it was found that increasing group size was related to a decrease in selfconsciousness. Group density did not influence self-consciousness. In Experiment 2 it was found that increases in the number of observers increased self-consciousness. In Experiments 1 and 2, self-reports of self-consciou sness were independent of one's group, whereas the degree of behavioral disinhibition was highly correlated within groups. In Experiment 3 it was found that gender similarity within a group was related to lower self-consciousness. These findings offer support for a perceptual/att entional model of self-consciou sness within groups. Contrary to deindividuation theory predictions, however, behavior intensity did not vary across conditions in Experiments 1 and 2, even though self-consciousness did differ. This finding suggests that deindividuation theory is incomplete in its present form, and several potential inadequacies are discussed. The concept of deindividuati on was derived from the Gestalt idea of perception of whole figures (Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 19S2). Festinger and his colleagues maintained that just as visual attention can be directed by the characteristics of visual figures, so one's attention to persons and oneself when one is in a group may be directed by the characteristics of the group. The theory of deindividuati on suggests that the characteristics of certain groups may serve to draw the group members' attention away from themselves and toward the group as a whole. In other words, persons in groups with certain characteristics may be less self-conscious or self-aware because their attention is directed to the groups in which they are immersed. Diener (1979, 1980) further developed the theory of deindividuati on by hypothesizing that when one's attention is drawn outward toward the group, one will rely less on one's own standards and be more influ

A model for landmark learning in the honey-bee

1. A single bee is rewarded with sugar for visits to the centre of a circle of eight landmarks. 2. After training, tests are given in which the sugar is removed and the flight path of the bee recorded as it searches for it. The bee persistently searches a small area in the centre of the circle, demonstrating that it has learnt the position of the sugar relative to the landmarks (Fig. 1A, C). 3. In a second test, three landmarks are removed leaving a semi-circle. The bee now searches a small area “inside” the semi-circle (Fig. 1B, D). In its chosen position none of the landmarks match in size, bearing, or angular separation with the values of the landmarks present during training (Fig. 2), showing that a “retinal matching” model of landmark learning does not predict these results. 4. It is suggested that the bee is not measuring the position of individual landmarks but the overall landmark configuration, a “Gestalt” hypothesis first put forward by van Beusekom (1948). It is hypothesised that the bee moves “inside” the semi-circle in an attempt to have landmarks “surrounding” it as it had when collecting sugar from the centre of the circle. 5. The term “sourroundedness”, a concept similar to the Gestalt idea of “degree of closure” is given a rigid definition. A term describing landmark average distance and a comparison process are also defined, these terms are incorporated into a computer program. 6. The computer program successfully predicts the results of a series of experiments with various training and testing situations (Figs. 1, 5, 6, 7) and some results found by van Beusekom (1948) with the digger wasp (Fig. 8). 7. The model is compared with a “retinal” model and its behaviour in real world situations discussed. It is concluded that the model, although containing some arbitrary features, represents a possible, rigidly defined and testable model of the landmark learning of the bee.