Gestalt Psychology - Essay Example

Gestalt psychology is a school of thought that considers the human mind as well as the behavior as a whole and not in parts. It means the unified whole approach. Max Wertheimer fronted the whole idea in order to respond partially to the view of structuralism that had earlier been brought forward by Wilhelm Wundt. It lays emphasis on the fact that the whole of any substance is usually greater than any of its parts. The building blocks of the whole can never be deduced from the analysis of its parts in isolation. This aspect of psychology sought to include the qualities and meaning of form.

The key rule in Gestalt psychology is based on the fact that the human mind generates objects in their whole form in the understanding of the individual components of that object. This aspect of psychology aims at developing a proper understanding of the laws of our capacity to obtain as well as retain meaningful insights in the world which is full of challenging situations that demand clear understanding. The theory argues that perceptions are a result of complicated exchanges that exist among numerous stimuli. The school of thought is closely tied to the theory of gestalt effect which relates to the ability of the human brain to create whole forms in close association with the visual identification of global features as opposed to the gathering of simple as well as unconnected elements. As opposed to the behaviorist approach which aims at developing an understanding of cognitive attributes, Gestalt psychology aims at understanding and elaborating the organization of the cognitive processes.

Principles of Gestalt Psychology

There exist four main principles of Gestalt psychology which include emergence, reification, invariance, and multistability. Multistability refers to the trend of vague perceptual experiences appearing back and forth in an unstable manner between two or more alternatives. The phenomena can be illustrated by the three-legged blivet and the Necker cube. The invariance principle is an aspect of the property of perception in which simple geometrical objects are identifiable independent of rotation, scale as well as translation.

Emergence refers to the process by which difficult patterns are obtained from simpler rules. The principle is best illustrated by the view of the dog picture which elaborates a Dalmatian dog that is sniffing the ground located around the shade of trees just above it. The dog cannot be clearly recognized through the identification of its specific body parts such as the feet, ears, nose, eyes, and tail but it appears as a whole. Reification relates to the generative dimension of a given perception through which the experienced percept bears more clearly spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which the premise is situated.  It is the development made in the study of illusory contours which are regarded as actual contours by the visual systems (Katz, D., & Tyson, R. 1979).

Conclusion

Gestalt psychology thus offers a clear demonstration of how the mind focuses on the whole in order to generate an understanding of various concepts as opposed to the use of the parts to understand perceptions. The general belief that the whole is usually greater than the total of individual parts has resulted in the discovery of several different factors that comes into play during a given perception.