The 8 Gestalt Laws

Gestalt Laws

Gestalt psychology is a branch of psychology that tries to explain how we apply pattern recognition of harmony of shapes in a frenetic world. The main principle of Gestalt is that the mind is capable of perceiving things as a global whole in order to make meaningful readings of common everyday objects. The main premise is that when the human mind exerts the principles of gestalt, the whole has a reality of its own regardless of its component parts. In a nutshell, the perception of an object or system only has meaning if it's complete. Were one to take it apart into its consituent parts, each bit would hold no relevance for the understanding of how it plays out its functions as opposed when it was part of the functioning whole. Another way of referring to Gestalt principles is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Just assembling together a pile of components won't mean as much as having the same items working in unison to achieve a common goal. Another way of understanding this notion is that the whole is greater than the sum. According to gestaltists, the organisation of cognisition processes accounts for our faculty of recognising patterns and predicting behaviours. There are 8 laws to describe the underlying cognitive process that allows for our coherent organisation of information:

1 - Law of Proximity— The law of proximity states that when an individual perceives an assortment of objects they perceive objects that are close to each other as forming a group. For example, in the picture below, there are 72 circles, but we perceive the collection of circles in groups, associating the ones close to each other as a single group.

The Law of Proximity implies that we consider the circles belonging to groups according to how close they are to each other.

2 - Law of Similarity— This law states that assorted ietms are perceptually grouped together if they bear a striking similarity to each other, like shape, colour, shading or other visible qualities. For example, the figure illustrating the law of similarity portrays 36 circles all equal distance apart from one another forming a square. In this depiction, 18 of the circles are shaded dark and 18 of the circles are shaded light. We perceive the dark circles as grouped together, and the light circles as grouped together forming six horizontal lines within the square of circles. This perception of lines is due to the law of similarity.

Law of Similarity or how like belongs to like.

 



3 - Law of Closure—The law of closure states that people perceive objects such as shapes, letters, pictures etc., as a whole unit when they are not complete even if parts of it are missing. For instance, when reading text from another interlocutor and you realise a mispelled or incomplete word you use your perception to fill in the gaps,like in incomplete words like hippopotamu, distinctiv, semiti, hobbl and indstry. The persumption of what the word is supposed to be happens on the subconscious level. The Law of Closure is widely applied when taking notes and writing on-field reports which need to be quickly done without much worry to form when we use abbreviations and shot forms for words. A good strategy of the law of closure in this context is using only consonants when writing down words, except for the first word e.g.: adrs for address. cty for city. redsgn for redesign etc.

4- Law of Symmetry— the mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point. IN this process the mind seeks to form a coherent shape in order to better information about said object.


5 - Law of Common Fate— this law states that objects are perceived as lines that move along the smoothest path. Experiments using the visual sensory modality found that we perceive elements of objects to have trends of motion, which indicate the path that the object is on.

6 - Law of Continuity— the elements of an object are integrated into perceptual wholes if they are aligned within an object. In cases where there is an overlap of the lines and shapes between objects, the two objects are perceived as two single uninterrupted entities.

7 - Law of Good Gestalt— elements are perceived as belonging to the same group if they have a pattern that is regular, simple and orderly. Regular and simple shapes are favoured over irregular and complex-looking shapes for good design and easily memorable signs.

8 - Law of Past Experience—The law of past experience implies that under some circumstances visual stimuli are categorized according to past experience. If two objects tend to be observed within close proximity, or small temporal intervals, the objects are more likely to be perceived together. For example, the English language contains 26 letters that are grouped to form words using a set of rules. If an individual reads an English word they have never seen, they use the law of past experience to interpret the letters "L" and "I" as two letters beside each other, rather than using the law of closure to combine the letters and interpret the object as an uppercase U.