Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 gestalt laws of organization 
, these principles were set forth in the 
early 1900s by a group of German psychologists who studied patterns, or gestalts
(Wertheimer, 1923). Those psychologists discovered a number of important principles 
that are valid for visual (as well as auditory) stimuli, illustrated in Figure 2: closure, 
proximity, similarity, and simplicity.
Figure 2a illustrates closure : We usually group elements to form enclosed or com-
plete fi gures rather than open ones. We tend to ignore the breaks in Figure 2a and 
gestalt laws of organization
A series 
of principles that describe how we 
organize bits and pieces of information 
into meaningful wholes.
 Key Concepts
What principles underlie our 
organization of the visual 
world and allow us to make 
sense of our environment?
How are we able to perceive 
the world in three dimensions 
when our retinas are capable of 
sensing only two-dimensional 
images?
What clues do visual illusions 
give us about our under-
standing of general percep-
tual mechanisms?
M O D U L E 1 3
Perceptual Organization: 
Constructing Our View of the World
(a)
(b)
FIGURE 1 
When the usual cues we use 
to distinguish fi gure from ground are 
absent, we may shift back and forth 
between diff erent views of the same 
fi gure. If you look at each of these 
objects long enough, you’ll probably 
experience a shift in what you’re seeing. 
In (a), you can see either a vase or the 
profi les of two people. In (b), the shaded 
portion of the fi gure, called a Necker 
cube, can appear to be either the front 
or the back of the cube.
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