Ch. 14 Gestalt Psychology

Behaviorists rebelled against what and attacked the study of what?

rebelled against functionalists and structuralists…they attacked the study of consciousness

Elementism

The belief that complex mental or behavioral processes are composed of or derived from simple elements and that the best way to understand these processes is first to find the elements of which they are composed

What psychologist took issue with Wundt’s elementism

German

What did German psychologist argue about consciousness

consciousness could not be reduced to elements without distorting the true meaning of conscious experience

What does Gestalt mean?

People experience things in meaningful, intact configurations

What approach did the German psychologists advocate for?

Molar approach

What does the molar approach concentrate on

on phenomenological experience—mental experience as it occurred to the naïve observer, without further analysis (experience as it appears in consciousness).

Immanuel Kant and the Gestaltists both believed that consciousness cannot be

Reduced to sensory stimulation, and conscious experience is different from the elements that compose it

What two perceptions did Ernst Mach postulate?

Space form and time form

Space form and time form

Space form and time form appeared to be independent of the particular elements that composed the, . Wide variety of sensory elements can give rise to the same perception

Who is now of the founders of gestalt psychology?

Wertheimer

According to Ehrenfel and Mach, from is something that..?

Emerges form the elements of sensation

Who wrote on Gestalt Qualities?

Ehrenfels

William James postulated a stream of consciousness in contrast to..?

the mind being composed of isolated mental elements

James frequently sought to align phenomenological experience with..?

The underlying physiology

What is gestalt psychology?

A theory of mind that emphasizes how humans perceive patterns and structures in the world around them

What are the origins of gestalt psychology?

20th century mainly Germany, focused on understanding how people tend to organize info into meaningful wholes, rather than just processing individual elements

What is the core idea behind gestalt psychology?

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

What is phi phenomenon and who is it associated with?

A perceptions of apparent movement when the elements of the experience are stationary

• optical illusion where stationary objects shown in rapid succession appear to be moving

• Wertheimer

What did Wertheimer propose about perceptions?

That our perceptions are different than the sensations that comprise them

Whose paper describing phenomenon is customarily taken as the formal beginning of gestalt psychology?

Wertheimer

What three individuals are considered the cofounders of Gestalt psychology

Koffka, Kohler, Wertheimer

What Koffka article provided a misrepresentation of Gestaltists only being interested in perception?

Perception: An introduction to Gestalt-theorie”

Gestalt followers were interested in

Perception , learning, thinking, development, physiology, and more

Who wrote mentality of apes?

Kohler

What research did Kohler partake in?

Did research regarding aspects of learning which greatly influenced Gestalt ideas, including the nature of learning in chimpanzees

Who established gestalt psychology in the US

Kohler

Isomorphism

it refers to the idea that there is a correspondence between the perceptual experience and the underlying neural processes. Essentially, the pattern we perceive in our mind corresponds to a similar pattern of brain activity

What does isomorphism concept suggest?

That the brain organizes sensory information in a way that directly mirrors the external world, maintaining a kind of harmony between perception and physical reality

Law of Prägnaz (law of simplicity, law of good figure)

It states that people tend to perceive and interpret complex images in the simplest, most stable, and most symmetrical form. In other words, when faced with ambiguity, the mind will prefer to organize the elements into the simplest and most coherent structure possible, which is often the most symmetrical and orderly configuration.

Gestaltists propose that the brain contains

Structural field of electrochemical forces

Field theory

Cognitive experience results from the fields of brain activity transforming sensory data and giving that data characteristics it otherwise would not possess.

• According to this analysis, the whole (electrochemical force fields in the brain) exists prior to the parts (individual sensations) and it is the whole that gives the parts their identity and meaning.

Psychophysical isomorphism

The force fields in the brain or patterns produced by the brain, rather than sensory experience, transform incoming sensory data and that is the transformed data that we experience consciously (mental experience).

• patterns of brain activity and the patterns Psyc of conscious experience are structurally equivalent

The brain is

A dynamic configuration of forces that transforms sensory information

The notion of isomorphism necessitated an opposition to

to the constancy hypothesis, which states there is a one-to-one correspondence between environmental stimuli and sensations

fro gestalt psychology, what dominates our perceptions

Organized brain activity

Top down analysis

Analysis proceeded from the top to the bottom instead of from the bottom to the top, in other words analysis proceeded from the whole to the parts.

Law of pragnanz

The psychological organization will always be as good as conditions allow because fields of brain activity will always distribute themselves in the simplest way possible under the prevailing conditions.

What does try law of pragnanz assert

that all cognitive experiences will tend to be as organized, symmetrical, simple, and regular as they can be, given the pattern of brain activity at any given moment.

• that is what “as good as conditions allow” mean