A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception I. Perceptual Grouping and Figure-Ground Organization

By Johan Wagemans, James H. Elder, Michael Kubovy, Stephen E. Palmer, Mary A. Peterson, Manish Singh, R. von der Heydt. 2012

1,461 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In 1912, Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. Because of its continued relevance in modern psychology, this centennial anniversary is an excellent opportunity to take stock of what Gestalt psychology has offered and how it has changed since its inception. We first introduce the key findings and ideas in the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, and then briefly sketch its development, rise, and fall. Next, we discuss its empirical and conceptual problems, and indicate how they are addressed in contemporary research on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. In particular, we review the principles of grouping, both classical (e.g., proximity, similarity, common fate, good continuation, closure, symmetry, parallelism) and new (e.g., synchrony, common region, element and uniform connectedness), and their role in contour integration and completion. We then review classic and new image-based principles of figure-ground organization, how it is influenced by past experience and attention, and how it relates to shape and depth perception. After an integrated review of the neural mechanisms involved in contour grouping, border-ownership, and figure-ground perception, we conclude by evaluating what modern vision science has offered compared to traditional Gestalt psychology, whether we can speak of a Gestalt revival, and where the remaining limitations and challenges lie. A better integration of this research tradition with the rest of vision science requires further progress regarding the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which will be the focus of a second review paper.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networks (2020, background): “They describe which stimulus-cues influence the perceived grouping of a set of discrete elements (Wertheimer, 1923; Wagemans et al., 2012a).”
Deep Hierarchies in the Primate Visual Cortex: What Can We Learn for Computer Vision? (2013, background): “This is very much linked to the observation that statistics of natural scenes are linked to laws of perceptual organization, an idea first formulated by Brunswick and Kamiya [17] which was then later confirmed computationally (see [199] for a review).”
A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception II. Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations (2012, methodology): “…carefully measured the preference for one dot organization over another as a function of interelement distances, generally finding data consistent with a pure distance law in which grouping strength decays exponentially as a function of interelement distance (see Wagemans et al., 2012, Section 3).”
The steady-state visual evoked potential in vision research: A review. (2015, background): “The phenomenological appearance of the motion relationships and the apparent direction of motion are thus subject to a set of rules that may be driven by prior experience with natural images (Wagemans et al., 2012).”
Deep Learning for Free-Hand Sketch: A Survey (2020, neutral): “Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) has been widely studied [5], [15], [136], [137], [138], [139], [140], [141], [142], [143], [144], [145], [146] in recent years.”
Brain-Like Object Recognition with High-Performing Shallow Recurrent ANNs (2019, result): “…was originally believed to be largely feedforward because of its fast time scale [7], it has long been suspected that recurrent connections must be relevant for some aspects of object perception [22, 1, 44], and recent studies have shown their role even at short time scales [16, 42, 35, 32, 5].”