Q.What is the main proposition of Gestalt psychologists with respect to perception of the visual field?

Our visual field, taken purely as raw sensory input, is really just a collection of separate elements -- points, lines, patches of colour -- yet what we actually experience is not a jumble of disconnected pieces but organised, meaningful wholes: we see 'a bicycle,' not an unrelated pile of a saddle, two wheels, and a handlebar. This process of organising the visual field into meaningful whole objects is called form perception. The most widely accepted explanation of how this organisation happens comes from a group of researchers known as the Gestalt psychologists (prominent among them Kohler, Koffka, and Wertheimer). The German word 'Gestalt' refers to a regular, whole figure or form. According to this school of thought, we perceive stimuli not as isolated, discrete elements but as an organised 'whole' carrying a definite form of its own -- and, importantly, this whole is different from the mere sum of its individual parts. A flower pot holding a bunch of flowers, for instance, is perceived as one whole configuration; if the flowers are removed, the pot by itself is still perceived as a complete whole -- it is simply a different configuration now, not a 'damaged' version of the earlier one. Gestalt psychologists further proposed that our cerebral (brain) processes are consistently oriented toward perceiving what they termed a 'good figure,' or pragnanz -- a preference for organised, well-formed wholes over disorganised, fragmentary impressions. The single most primitive, basic form that this organising tendency takes is figure-ground segregation: when we look at any visual surface, certain parts of it spontaneously stand out as clearly defined, separate entities (the 'figure'), while the remaining parts recede into a relatively formless backdrop (the 'ground') -- for example, printed words on a page, or a painting on a wall, stand out as the figure, while the page and the wall recede as background. Beyond this most basic figure-ground split, Gestalt psychologist …