In 1890 the Austrian psychologist Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) wrote of certain perceptual Gestaltqualitaten or “form qualities” that could not be introspectively broken down into separate sensory elements, but instead resided in the overall configurations of objects or ideas. The implications of these Gestalt qualities remained unexplored until 1910, when Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) decided to explore it. The three of them subsequently founded a movement that they called Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology focuses on the ways the mind organizes experiences and perceptions into organized wholes that are more than the sums of their separate parts. The closest English equivalent to the German word Gestalt is “form”.
Wertheimer’s inspiration was to study the optical illusion of apparent movement: the perception of continuous motion that occurs when observing a succession of slightly varying still images. Wertheimer decided this interesting effect could be studied systematically in a laboratory, using simple visual stimuli. With a tachistoscope Wertheimer showed, on the basis of different time intervals and still images, that a minimum interval is needed to see that it is two separate, still images. This apparent movement (a simplified form of a film) he called the phi phenomenon. Wertheimer went on to show that an observer, presented with randomly distributed examples of real movement and comparable apparent movement, could not distinguish one type from the other. When we observe actual movement, light images literally sweep across our retinas, falling on all the receptor cells lying in their path. With the phi phenomenon, only the retinal receptors lying at the beginning and at the end of the “sweep” become physically illuminated. Yet both of these differing physical states produce the same perception of continuous motion. These findings indicated that some of the processes responsible for the perception of movement must take place at a neurological level deeper than the retina, and that the perception of movement is something that may be imposed on stationary images by the higher brain processes. They emphasized how the mind tends to organize the elements of experience into wholes, whose significance is much greater than that of their summed individual parts.
From this perspective, the Gestalt psychologists pointed out that perception always occurs in a “field” divided into what’s known as figure and ground. The figure is the whole entity that is consciously observed, and the ground is the necessary backdrop against which the figure is defined. According to the Gestalt concept, figure cannot exist without ground; for example, the printed words you’re reading cannot be perceived (as figure) except against the lighter background of the screen. Figure and ground can never both be in consciousness at the same time, because then both would be part of the figure, but under some conditions they may reverse. Wertheimer, Koffka and Köhler emphasize that the mind tries to simplify and organize perceptual fields in which observed figures occur. This happens with more complex combinations of stimuli. These are perceived by consciousness as several small groups of stimuli. The same applies to auditory information, here too something must be heard against a relatively neutral background.
Source: Fancher, R. E., & Rutherford, A. (2017). Pioneers of Psychology: A History (5th ed.). W.W. Norton And Company
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