Perceptual Organizations

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Perceptual Organizations

• Several Theories

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Constructionist View

• The brain constructs a perception out of a great
  many individual sensations.
• For example When you meet someone, you look at
  their face and your brain takes in sensations
  from each part of their face creating how you see
  the face.

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The Gestalt Psychologists

• Max Wertheimer
• Germen Psychologist
• Formed a group of psychologists that believed
  that the whole is more important the sum of the
  parts and that each part affects every other.
• The brain immediately perceives a stimulus as a
  whole, rather than focusing on the individual
  sensations.

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More on the Gestalt School

• Focused on interactions of the parts observing
  how the brain uses certain perceptual cues to
  make sense of the things.
• Developed laws of perception.
• There are four Gestalt Laws of perception.

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Law of Proximity

• We tend to group together things that are
• close to one another.
• See page 69

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Law of Similarity

• We group together things that have some
• visual element in common, such as size,
• shape and color.
• See Page 69

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Law of Contiuation

• We tend to see interrupted lines as
• continuous lines with something hiding part
• of them.
• See page 70

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Law of Closure

• We tend to fill in missing details to complete
• a figure so that it has a consistent overall
• Form.
• See page 70

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Cant see the forest for the trees

• Bottom up processing Pattern recognition that
  begins with an analysis of small units or
  features and eventually results in perception.
• Top Down Processing Involves a persons
  knowledge of the world. Begins with an analysis
  of higher-level information that you already may
  have about the stimulus.

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Are you a top down or bottom up thinker?

• Do you concentrate on details of a situation and
  make up your mind or do you include prior
  knowledge and look at the big picture?
• Details Bottom up
• Big Picture Top Down

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