Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology is a school of psychology that studies how the mind organizes elements into meaningful wholes, especially in perception. It holds that organized patterns have properties not reducible to their separate parts.

Gestalt laws of grouping: Principles describing how perceptual elements are organized into groups and patterns. These laws specify the grouping operations central to Gestalt accounts of perception.
Max Wertheimer: A German psychologist who founded Gestalt psychology and studied apparent motion. His experiments on apparent motion helped establish the school’s central claim about organized experience.
Gestalt therapy: A form of psychotherapy emphasizing present experience, awareness, and the relationship between person and environment. It adapted Gestalt themes of organization and wholeness into a distinct therapeutic approach.
Associationism: A theory that explains complex mental contents through associations among simpler ideas or sensations. Gestalt psychology rejected the idea that association among elements fully explains organized perception.
Figure–ground organization: The perceptual division of a scene into a focal figure and its surrounding background. Gestalt psychologists treated figure–ground separation as a basic form of perceptual organization.
Wolfgang Köhler: A German psychologist known for Gestalt research on insight and problem solving. His studies extended Gestalt ideas from perception to intelligent behavior.
Gestalt principles in graphic design: The use of perceptual grouping principles to organize visual compositions and interfaces. Designers use proximity, similarity, and closure to make layouts read as coherent units.
Behaviorism: An approach to psychology that focuses on observable behavior and its environmental causes. Its emphasis on observable responses contrasts with Gestalt interest in phenomenal organization.
Prägnanz: A principle that perception tends toward the simplest, most stable organization available. It summarizes the preference for orderly forms in Gestalt explanations of perception.
Kurt Koffka: A German psychologist who helped develop and introduce Gestalt psychology to English-speaking audiences. His writings made the school’s principles accessible beyond its original setting.

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