Almost 90 years ago, Gestalt psychologists identified some principles of perception, among many still stand. The principles are:
1. The law of proximity; the tendency for us to perceive objects close to each other to belong together. 2. The law of continuity; the tendency to see imaginary lines or curves even if the line/curve don't have connected parts. 3. The law of closure; the tendency to fill in information of missing parts. 4. The law of similarity; the tendency to perceive similar objects as belonging to each other. 5. The law of pragnanz; the tendency to prefer symmetric, regular, orderly and simple shapes. 6. The law of figure-ground; the tendency to differentiate an object from its' surrounding area. Here is a website that summarizes the principles: Gestalt principles In modern cognitive psychology, this area of research is called pattern recognition. For instance do we seem to have a function in the brain for recognizing faces. We are now fairly certain that pattern recognition is an innate ability of humans and that the mind actively organizes and make meaning out of the environment based on their pattern recognition system. The issue is how the mind does this. One problem is that it is impossible for the mind to store an image of a particular object for every possible angle or variation, our memory storage capacity just isn't large enough. (this is why we have the ability for imagination, where we simulate movement and angles of objects mentally. See Kosslyn's research) Another similar problem is how we can recognize variations of a particular object, even if we have never seen the variation before? How can we recognize the letter Y for instance, when it is written in a different font? According to Neisser's feature analysis theory, the mind stores features of certain objects (such as the vertical and horizontal lines, curves and diagonals of letters) and then compare the features with the object. The more the features match the object, the more likely we are to identify the object as belonging to that particular category.
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AuthorThis is my class blog for IB Psychology. Here I will publish reflections on psychology, reviews of psychology books, recommended links, lecture notes, and information on psychology topics that are not covered by the syllabus. You are free to add comments or ask me questions. Archives
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