The Gestalt principle of perception suggests that the human mind sees patterns in incomplete representations of objects or concepts and infers the nature of the whole from these patterns. It stands in opposition to the Atomist approach, which claims that human perception is based on breaking down objects into identifiable parts. The Gestalt principles are based on four fundamental premises: similarity, continuation, proximity, and closure. The concept of closure is the most fundamental aspect of the Gestalt principle of perception.
The principle of gestalt perception is the concept that the human mind sees patterns in incomplete representations of objects or concepts and is able to infer the nature of the whole from these patterns. It stands in direct opposition to the Atomist approach in psychological theory, which claims that human perception is based on the ability to break down concepts or objects into basically identifiable parts. The types of perception for the human mind were first intensively studied in the late 19th century by psychology, and the gestalt principle of perception arose at the time to challenge atomism. It was promoted in the 1919s by renowned thinkers such as Johann von Goethe, Ernst Mach and Max Wertheimer. The most basic of the underlying Gestalt principles is that the human mind perceives meaning based on the higher brain context of what its senses witness more than it is based on the entire sensory content before it.
How the human mind achieves the perceptual organization of its surroundings may remain an incomplete mystery indefinitely, although psychology as of 2011 has a fundamental understanding of how it works. Gestalt principles are based on four fundamental premises about how people think. These involve the ideas of similarity, continuation, proximity, and closure.
The concept of similarity means that the human mind groups objects and events that have basic traits in common and sees higher connections between them that make them appear as a unified whole. Continuation involves a visual trait in which the eye is led to follow a certain pattern to the end to find meaning in an object, which is often based on simple lines or curves found in natural and man-made environments. Proximity is related to continuation and is a tendency to think of grouping objects that are physically close to each other as parts of a larger whole, such as a series of small blocks lined up next to each other that are perceived as constituting one block bigger.
Closure is one of the most fundamental aspects of the Gestalt principle of perception, which states that the mind essentially “fills in the blanks” when viewing an incomplete image or pattern. The mind tends to give incompleteness a greater meaning, relying in part on guesses from memory and experience as to what the missing elements would be. There is also a natural tendency with human perception for the mind to orient itself in an environment based on up and down directions, which are referred to as figure and ground. Objects are differentiated by a platform on which they are supposed to rest or by a background on which they are superimposed. This tendency is so innate in the Gestalt principle of perception that when perspective is removed as in a weightless environment in space or underwater, the human mind can become disoriented and confused.
A convenient way to imagine how the two opposing theories of Atomism and the Gestalt principle of perception differ is to consider how someone “sees” a tree. The Atomism approach claims that someone first sees the individual components – the leaves, branches, trunk and so on – and then assembles them all in the mind to realize that it is a tree. The Gestalt principle of perception states that the whole tree is seen first, even if significant parts of it are missing from view or distorted, and its individual components such as leaves or fruit are not usually or immediately present at a conscious level.
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