In this video I focus on perception and how we make sense of the information coming in from our senses. Gestalt laws refer to general principles for organizing and interpreting sensory information. I provide visual examples for several gestalt laws including closure, proximity, similarity, continuity, simplicity, and common fate and suggest some possible ways of applying these laws to other senses.
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Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review.
In the previous videos we’ve recovered each of our senses in a fair amount of detail so now I’d like to return to the idea of perception and think about how we interpret and organize all of this information that’s coming in from our senses. How do we make sense of all this information?
Well, some early German psychologists came up with some rules for how we interpret information and they called these gestalt laws. So the idea of gestalt psychology this comes from the German word for form or structure, gestalt, the idea is that we can’t think of things just as their parts, right?
The expression that’s often used to summarize gestalt psychology is that the whole is different than the sum of the parts. In other words, you can only understand something when you consider it in its entire context. You can’t just look at the pieces of it and understand it. This applies to how we make sense of the information coming in from our senses. So we can’t just understand what we see by looking at each part of it. We see the entire thing and that’s how we understand what it is. So these gestalt laws try to come up with some general rules of how perception operates.
So I’ll go through each of these rules and give some examples. Now the examples I use are going to be visual, but these gestalt laws can be applied to other senses and I’ll talk about that at the end of the video. So the first rule we have is this idea of closure. The idea of closure is that our brain fills in the gaps. We close things off and perceive things even if we can’t see all of the information. We actually saw this already when we demonstrated the blind spot, this idea of our brain filling in missing information, but the same would apply to us something like this. Maybe you’ve seen an illusion like this.
If I draw these three sort of Pacmen figures here you get his experience of seeing a triangle in the middle. I probably could have drawn it a little neater. But of course there’s no triangle actually there. So this demonstrates this idea that the whole is different than the sum of the parts. We can’t understand the appearance of the triangle if we only think about each part. Each part doesn’t create the triangle, we need all three of them together in order for it appear.
So this is the idea of closure. You can find many other examples of closure if you look at logos for a lot of businesses. They often use closure. They don’t want to draw in all the details of what they’re trying to represent so they outline the details and allow your brain to fill in the rest.
Ok so next we have the idea of proximity. So the idea of proximity is that when things are near each other we tend to perceive them as being a group. So if I drew a bunch of boxes here, if you were going to perceive groups here, you’d probably choose based on how close the boxes were to each other. In other words, you’d see this as a group here and this as a group here. You wouldn’t say “this is a group with this one, this one goes with this one over here”, you could do that but it doesn’t really make sense. You’d probably prefer to rely on this idea of proximity.
So that’s our second gestalt law. Next we have the idea of similarity. So let’s use some more boxes, and this time I’m going to try to draw them fairly equally spaced so we can’t use proximity anymore. So how would you group these objects, well it’s kind of obvious. You’d group them based on how similar they are to one another. You’d probably see this as a group of yellow boxes and a group of blue boxes rather than a group of one yellow box and one blue box, this group is two yellow boxes and one blue box. That’s not how you would probably choose to perceive this.
OK next we have this idea of continuity. Continuity is the idea that we perceive things as being continuous even if we can’t see for a fact that they are continuous. We make this general assumption and we perceived continuity.
So for instance, let’s see I have some line here let’s choose another color here. OK so what is this trying to show? Well you probably perceive this orange object here as being a single object, even though you don’t know that it continues behind that gray bar there. It could be two objects it could be this object here and then a different object starting over here and they’re not actually connected but you tend to perceive that things are continuous. You see one half of it over here it appears to continue over here, you assume that it’s one continuous object.
This explains, you see magicians doing some illusion. You’ve got this box here and the woman’s head over here and then you’ve got these feet sticking out over here and the assumption is that these feet here go with this head here, that this one continuous body and then the magicians comes in an saws this in half, and you’re amazed and everything. That’s partially relying on this idea of continuity you see her feet, you see her head, you automatically assume that these are connected things. That they’re not separate, that these are someone else’s feet and this is someone else’s head.
OK next we have the idea of simplicity. Simplicity just says that we tend to perceive the simplest explanation for the things that we see rather than equally plausible but more complicated explanations. So for instance, some picture here. OK I said to you “what is this a picture of?” you’d probably look at it and say “it looks like 1,2,3,4,5 boxes on top of each other, five squares that are all overlapping.” That’s the most simple explanation for what’s going on here.
You’d be pretty unlikely to look at this and say “OK well I think this is one of the shapes here and then over here there’s this shape in here and then this is a shape here.” You wouldn’t perceive it that way. It’s equally plausible, it could very well be the case that that’s what I was trying to represent here but the simpler explanation is that it’s five boxes just overlapping each other.
So that’s the idea of simplicity. We like simple explanations for things rather than equally plausible but more complicated explanations.
OK the last gestalt law we have is common fate. And this one is the idea that things that move in the same direction are perceived as a group. So if we were looking at a group of objects here, you’re looking at these, you might perceive these all as one group when you first look at them, but if, suddenly, these three of them all moved away at the same time you would suddenly perceive those three as being a group. And the two remaining there as being a different group.
That’s because they’re moving in the same direction and you automatically perceive that as being a group. Similarly, if you looked into an aquarium and you saw a bunch of fish swimming around and some fish are swimming to the left and some fish are swimming to the right, what you’d probably perceive from that is two groups of fish: one group moving to the right, one group moving to the left, rather than thinking of them all as individual fish that just happen to be swimming in similar directions at some points in time.
OK so keep in mind that these gestalt laws apply to other senses as well. They’re usually demonstrated visually because it’s a bit easier to understand but we see these laws for other senses as well. For instance, in the case of proximity, when you’re listening to music, you might tend to group higher notes as being a group that go together and lower notes as being a different group rather than thinking of it as jumping back and forth between really high and low notes.
Or similarly, you’d group similar instruments in an orchestra. You might group the brass instruments as one sound that you perceive all at once vs. the string section as being a separate group. Rather than trying to have some randomness mish mash of it’s the violas and the trombones and the violins and the French horns. You’d probably perceive the groups in terms of their similarity of the sounds.
We could apply it to other senses as well. For instance if you felt something touching your skin on your arm here, you felt a bunch of different things touching you, if they were all moving at once on your body you’d probably assume it was one object. It’s one giant spider crawling on you rather than perceiving it as eight little objects moving independently.
OK so on those are the gestalt laws and in the next video we’ll look into perception in a little more detail for vision.
So I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more.
Thanks for watching!
