Gestalt Psychology

Running Head : GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

Gestalt psychology : The Study of Perception

[The Writer 's Name]

[The Name of the Institution]

Gestalt psychology : The Study of Perception

Background

Wertheimer 's of 1912 has usually been portrayed as the proximal event by which the Gestalt movement was brought into existence . There is truth to this , but it is a truth that must be qualified . Those who read Wertheimer 's at the time it was published were given little reason to suspect that in its wake , would soon come a movement calling itself

Gestalt psychology . The truth of the matter is that the Gestalt movement , though surely by this time conceived , had not yet been visibly born

The reason for this was that the basic working hypothesis of the movement -its major empirical generalization -- had not yet been fully drawn . The orthodox theory held that stimulation of a sense organ gives rise , within the brain , to a mosaic pattern of discrete excitations Wertheimer 's "physiological short circuit " on the contrary , was intended to suggest that this is not the case at all . If we are to do justice to the phenomena of perceived motion , he argued , and then we must assume that the various excitations within the brain become integrated into a kind of "physiological whole-process [Gesamtprozess] (Wertheimer , 1925 ) The implications of this view were perhaps not very obvious at the time , but in retrospect they are quite clear . If the various excitations within the brain are not discrete and punctiform then the sensations arising from them cannot be discrete or punctiform either . Indeed , they cannot be "sensations " at all -- at least , not in the sense in which the term had been used ever since Locke . It is still true , of course , that any given perception includes a number of distinguishable aspects , but these aspects can scarcely be spoken of as "sensations " since they are in every instance determined by the configuration , or "whole-form (Gesamtform ( Wertheimer , 1925 ) of the underlying neural process . The point to be made is this : If the state of excitation at a given place within the brain is influenced by the states of excitation of its neighbors , then it simply makes no sense to speak of "sensations " and "sensory elements for the doctrine of sensations requires that the sensory projection areas of the brain be influenced by nothing more than the respective sensory receptor units with which they are neurally connected

Introduction

The implicit within Wertheimer 's view of the workings of the nervous system was that basic working hypothesis of the Gestalt movement to which we alluded above . Now , following Wertheimer 's empirical researches and theoretical reflections , the way was paved for a kindred hypothesis which proved to be very novel indeed : namely , that perception as a whole is a function of Gestaltfaktoren . It was with the emergence of this hypothesis into explicitness that Gestalt psychology was born . We cannot say with certainty just when this occurred , nor even to which of the three founders...