This question appears in Mumbai University > Human Machine Interaction subject

Marks: 10 M

Year: Dec 12 & Dec 16

The principle is that the mind has a self-organizing tendency and it forms a global whole, the Gestalt psychology is an effort to study these laws of how human mind can acquire and put together this information and maintain the perception in this chaotic world. A gestalt has become a fabric for psychologists to form a descriptive skeleton rather than just a theory.

Visual perception in today’s world is heavily rooted to the neurophysiology of the eyes, optic nerve and brain.

There are several laws that help us predict how the sensations are interpreted. Some of them are listed below:

1. Principle of PROXIMITY

This law states that the objects are close to each other will be perceived as one group. This means that the relative distance between objects in a scene or picture affects our perception of how the objects are organized into subgroups.

In Fig. all the black squares are considered as one group. The letter E is thus perceived, as shown in Fig.;

2. Principle of SIMILARITY

As the name suggests other factor that affects our perception of grouping is when objects that look similar appear all other things being equal. In Fig., the T’s can be perceived as similar.

3. Principle of CONTINUITY This law is based on the fact that the visual system overlooks the discontinuities and gaps images. The human visual system is designed in a way that tries to resolve the ambiguity by automatically filling in, these missing data in a way that the objects appear as a whole.

The eye actually urges to move through an object continuing into another. The principle of continuity, states that our visual perception is biased to perceive continuous forms that discrete slices or sections.

4. Principle of CLOSURE

This law is strongly related to the law of continuity, which states that our visual system automatically tries to close open figures so that they are perceived as whole objects rather than separate pieces. Thus, we perceive the disconnected arcs in Fig., as a letter “G”.

5. Principle of SYMMETRY

This is based on the fact that our brain tends to resolve complex patterns in a simplified form; the visual system is trained to format data by simplifying and giving it symmetry.

The complex shape on the far left of Fig,which looks like two overlapping diamonds, would be much better perceived as a pair of overlapping diamonds than the two figures to the right which are much complicated than visualizing as overlapping figures.

6. Principle of FIGURE/GROUND

This principle tells us about how our perceptual senses differentiate between object (figure/foreground) and its background (ground). The foreground consists of the elements of a scene that are of our primary focus, and other things mark the background.

For example, when a small object or color patch overlaps a larger one, we tend to perceive the smaller object as the ground.

7. Principle of COMMON FATE

The final Gestalt principle is the common Fate. This mainly concerns with moving objects. In other words it is the grouping of objects, things, people and animals that move together as one, in unison. Example: A fleet of birds, a school of fish, etc.

Fig. shows the examples of common fate.