Gestalt psychology

By W. Köhler. 1943

The aim of psychology is first of all to describe how we think, or the flow of our consciousness, and then to sum up the facts in terms of principles, generalizations, or “laws” which “govern” our thinking. These laws must enable us to foretell what a man will think and how he will act when we know his environment and the state of his thought at any given moment, provided that no unforeseeable exercise of free will intervenes. Psychology has also to inquire whether interventions of “free will” ever do occur and, if they do, what is their nature and scope.

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention (2021, neutral): “K ¨ ohler 1967; Shi & Malik 2000).”
Hedonic mediation of the crossmodal correspondence between taste and shape (2015, methodology): “Using the shape stimuli originally outlined by Köhler (1929), Spence and Gallace (2011) reported that certain foodstuffs, such as, for example, sparkling water and Maltesers (a form of honeycomb-centred chocolate confectionary), were associated with angular shapes, whereas others, like Brie (a…”
Linking Practice and Theory: The Pedagogy of Realistic Teacher Education (2001, background): “For example, the whole idea of learning-by-doing is in fact an old one, as is the notion of gestalts, which goes back to early gestalt psychology (see for example Köhler, 1947).”
Synesthesia: a new approach to understanding the development of perception. (2013, background): “The hypothesized connections were based on evidence that typical adults have biases to associate specific shapes and properties of stimuli to particular sounds (Kohler, 1929; Lindauer, 1990; Marks, 1996; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001).”
Dimensions and their poles: A metric and topological approach to opposites (2011, background): “Indeed, this work is an instance of ‘‘phenomenological psychophysics’’ (Kubovy, 2003), which is related to the experimental phenomenology of Bozzi (1989, Chapter 7, summarised by Kubovy, 1999, and discussed in relation to the present task by Savardi & Bianchi, 2000).”
Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages (2010, background): “In line with this, Köhler (1929) was the first to show that speakers tend to match certain speech sounds to certain shapes.”
The Origins of Lewin’s Three-Step Model of Change (2020, background): “Lewin was greatly influenced by Gestalt psychology (Köhler, 1967).”
The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High Functioning Autism, and Normal Sex Differences (2004, background): “Cognitive theories emphasize that empathy involves understanding the other’s feelings (Kohler, 1929).”
Associative Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory (2008, background): “This surprising result led Gestalt psychologists to propose an associative symmetry hypothesis (Asch & Ebenholtz, 1962; Köhler, 1947).”
Deformation-driven shape correspondence via shape recognition (2017, methodology): “These rules were inspired by Gestalt laws of perceptual grouping [Köhler 1929] and Occam’s Razor which seeks the simplest explanation. One may say that they are perceptual and represent a certain level of human cognition. The intriguing question is whether our RvNN, which is unsupervised, could “rep”
Multisensory synesthetic interactions in the speeded classification of visual size (2006, background): “, baluma; see Köhler, 1929). On the basis of such observations, Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001b) proposed that language might actually originate from synesthesia, driven by the natural constraints on the ways in which sounds are mapped to objects, rather than the other way around.”
Executive functions in insight versus non-insight problem solving: An individual differences approach (2009, result): “In contrast, the original Gestalt analyses of insight (Humphreys, 1951; Kohler, 1947) proposed automatic processes that resolved ‘‘stresses’’ inherent in misleading representations and so led to useful representations free from internal stresses.”
A Survey of Computer Vision-Based Human Motion Capture (2001, background): “The main philosophy of grouping information according to similarities is inspired by research into the human visual system by the Gestalt school in the 1930s [82].”