Principles of Perceptual Organisation

Our visual field, considered purely as raw sensory input, is really just a collection of separate elements -- points, lines, and patches of colour. Even so, we perceive these individual elements as organised wholes, or complete objects, rather than as disconnected fragments: we see a bicycle as one complete object, not as an unrelated collection of its separate parts (a saddle, two wheels, a handle, and so on). This process of organising the visual field into meaningful wholes is known as form perception, and it naturally raises the further question of exactly how the different parts of an object come to be organised into a single meaningful whole, and whether particular factors help or hinder this process of organisation.

Several scholars have tried to answer these questions, but the most widely accepted account has been offered by a group of researchers known as the Gestalt psychologists, prominent among them Kohler, Koffka, and Wertheimer. "Gestalt" itself refers to a regular figure or whole form. According to the Gestalt psychologists, we perceive different stimuli not as discrete, separate elements, but as an organised "whole" carrying a definite form of its own -- and this whole is, crucially, different from the simple sum of its individual parts. Their own example makes this point vividly: a flower pot holding a bunch of flowers is one complete whole; if the flowers are removed, the flower pot on its own is still perceived as a complete whole in its own right -- it is simply a different configuration, not a damaged or incomplete version of the earlier one. …