HISTORY OF GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

JOHAN WAGEMANS

LABORATORY OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN, BELGIUM
1.

INTRODUCTION
 Gestalt psychology

• present status of Gestalt psychology =

ambiguous
– on the one hand, Gestalt psychology = dead and
burried
• the Gestalt school has died with its founding fathers in the
1940s
• after some devastating empirical findings regarding electrical
field theory in the 1950s
• a natural decline because of fundamental obstacles against
further progress and stronger theoretical and experimental
frameworks arising and gaining dominance since the 1960s
and 1970s (e.g., cognitive science, neuroscience)
– on the other hand, Gestalt psychology = alive and
kicking
• almost all psychology textbooks still contain a Gestalt-like
chapter on perceptual organization (although often quite
detached from the other chapters)
• new empirical papers on Gestalt phenomena are published on
a regular basis (perhaps even at an increasing rate)
 Gestalt psychology

• main reasons
– limited knowledge of Gestalt psychology’s
history
– limited knowledge of Gestalt psychology’s
roots in phenomenology

• main aim of this lecture: to provide you

with this background knowledge
 History of Gestalt psychology:
Why bother?

• to provide you with the proper perspective to

be able to build on the foundations from the
past, while simultaneously avoiding its
mistakes

• to remove some of the misunderstandings

• to provide you with a broader framework to

situate and evaluate present work

• to make room for a better, deeper

understanding
2.

PHENOMENOLOGY
 Epistemology

• branch of philosophy dedicated to the origins

of knowledge
• until 19th century: mainly two opponent
schools
– empiricism: all knowledge founded on empirical
(sensory) experience, e.g.
• John Locke (1632-1704): “Nihil est in intellectu quod
non fuit prius in sensu”
• George Berkeley (1685-1753): “Esse est percipi”
• David Hume (1711-1776)
– rationalism: all knowledge founded on ratio
(reasoning, thought), e.g.
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): fundamental concepts
structure human experience
 Phenomenology

• a kind of third way (middle ground)

– against both empirism and rationalism
– knowledge does not follow from experience nor reasoning

• 2 main proponents

– Franz Brentano (1838-1917)

• strong influence in psychology
• Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte (1874)

– Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

• strong influence in philosophy: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
Sartre, Derrida, Levinas, Ricoeur, …
 Key ideas

1. intentionality
– crucial point of departure in phenomenology
– intentionality
= directedness of subject on object
= way to give meaning to objects
– defining characteristic of mental phenomena (in contrast
to physical phenomena)
– each mental phenomenon has a content and is directed
towards an object (Gegenstand)

2. presentations
– presentations (Vorstellungen) as acts
– conscious experience is always unitary, because
• presentations are directed towards objects (note: these can be
internal, these do not have to be external)
• presentations result from single whole (unitary act) of actual
presenting
 Implications

• mental phenomena are not contents (↔ structuralism by Wundt

and Titchener) but acts, activities, functions (cf. “Aktpsychologie”
// functionalism)
• in this approach, the world is built from within, but not in a
neurophysiological sense
• the world of experience is reducible neither to external nor to
internal psychophysics
• the experience is primary, conscious, self-evident, immediately
given, and endowed with qualities (such as colors, shapes,
movements, etc.) and meaning, not a product of the
computational elaboration of stimuli
• one perceives qualitative wholes, not physical entities
• at issue is the coherence of the structure, not the so-called
veridicality of the percepts
• “Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung”
– “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one”
(Albert Einstein)
– we can only be certain of our internal perceptions
3.

PRECURSORS
 Transition figures

• From phenomenology to Gestalt

psychology
– Ernst Mach (1838-1916)
– Alexius Meinong (1853-1920)
– Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932)
– Vittorio Benussi (1878-1927)
– Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)
– Friedrich Schumann (1863-1940)
 Ernst Mach (1838-1916)

• Physicist, mathematician, and

philosopher, working in Graz,
Prague, and Vienna

• “Beiträge zur Analyse der

Empfindungen” (1886)
– time and space are essential for
perception (cf. Kant)
– perception = epistemological basis
of all science
– strong influence on later
phenomenology and logical
positivism
– nice example: drawing of visual
field experienced through one eye
 Visual field

Ernst Mach, 1886 “As Seen” (after Mach), iPad drawing, 2012
by Robert Pepperell
http://www.robertpepperell.com/
 Alexius Meinong (1853-1920)

• studied history and philosophy in

Vienna (with Brentano)
• professor of philosophy in Graz,
founder of Psychological Institute
(1894)
• “Über Gegenstandstheorie”
(1904)
– real, existing objects (e.g., horse)
– intentional existence (e.g., unicorn)
• “objects of thought”
• “Meinong’s jungle”

• promotor of Christian von

Ehrenfels
Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932)

• studied with Brentano in Vienna

and with Meinong in Graz

• introduced the term “Gestalt” in

philosophy and psychology
– Johann Wolfgang Goethe:
• self-organizing forms in nature
• coherent, structured wholes with
symmetry and balance

• “Über Gestaltqualitäten” (1890)

– melody = more than a collection of
notes
 Vittorio Benussi (1878-1927)

• most important researcher of

Alexius Meinong’s
Gegenstandstheorie

• introduced Gestalt psychology in

Italy
– promotor of Cesare Musatti
– through him also influencing Fabio
Metelli and Gaetano Kanizsa

• major conflict with Kurt Koffka

(core of controversy between Graz
vs. Berlin school)

• a rather tragic figure for several

reasons
 Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)

• studied with Brentano, who sent him to

Göttingen, where he received training in
epistemology, physiology, and physics (from
Hermann Lotze)
• 1873: first major book on the psychological
origins of space
• 1879: first volume of his most important
scientific work “Tonpsychologie”
• very influential figure
– held chairs in Würzburg (1873), Prague (1879), Halle
(1884), Münich (1889), and Berlin (1893), where he
was asked to build a psychological institute that could
compete with Leipzig
– in Berlin he had many excellent coworkers (e.g.,
Wertheimer, Koffka, Köhler, Gelb, von Allesch, Lewin)
– all of these also studied at other universities but
Stumpf was the master under whom the Gestalt
theorists learned their trade as experimenters
Friedrich Schumann (1863-1940)

• student and assistant of Georg Elias Müller

in Göttingen
• assistant of Carl Stumpf in Berlin from
1894 till 1905
• 1900a, 1900b, 1904: “Beiträge zur
Analyse der Gesichtswahrnehmungen:
Einige Beobachtungen über die
Zusammenfassung von
Gesichtseindrücken zu Einheiten”
– first examples of grouping by proximity and
similarity
– first examples of subjective contours
• from 1910 director of Psychological
Institute in Frankfurt, where Koffka and
Köhler were assistants when Wertheimer
arrived
4.

EMERGENCE OF GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

(BERLIN SCHOOL)
 How Gestalt psychology started

Wertheimer, M. (1912). Experimentelle Studien

über das Sehen von Bewegung. Zeitschrift für
Psychologie, 61, 161-265.

 anecdote

 phi motion
 Steinman, R. M., Pizlo, Z., & Pizlo, F. J. (2000). Phi is not
beta, and why Wertheimer’s discovery launched the
Gestalt revolution. Vision Research, 40, 2257-2264.
 http://www1.psych.purdue.edu/Magniphi/MagniPhi.html

 key role
 phi as pure motion, not a displacement between
two objects
 phi as a process, “an across in itself”, that cannot
be composed from the usual optical contents
 A radical vision

 emerging Gestalt theory

 Gestalts emerging in the brain
 not Gestalt qualities added to the primary sensations
 not Gestalts as more than the sum of the parts
 but Gestalts as different from the sum of the parts
 often the whole is grasped even before the individual parts enter
consciousness
 a structured unit emerges as a whole
 psychological facts and physiological hypotheses went
hand-in-hand
 continuous whole-processes rather than associated combinations
of elementary excitations
 specifically: some kind of physiological short circuit, and a
flooding back of the current flow, creating a unitary continuous
whole-process
 Some early Gestalt history (1)

Koffka, K. (1915). Beitrage zur Psychologie der Gestalt.

III. Zur Grundlegung der Wahrnehmungspsychologie.
Eine Auseinandersetzung mit V. Benussi. Zeitschrift für
Psychologie, 73, 11-90.

implications of this view

 primary relations
 no longer stimulus ~ sensation
 but stimulus pattern ~ perceived whole
 perceived wholes
 not constructed in the mind from elementary Kurt Koffka
sensations (1886-1941)
 but direct experience-correlates emerging in the
brain
 Some early Gestalt history (2)

Köhler, W. (1920). Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe

und im stationären Zustand. Eine natur-philosophische
Untersuchung. Braunschweig, Germany: Vieweg.
decisive step: real physical Gestalts in the brain
 strong Gestalts
 the mutual dependence among the parts is so great that
no displacement or change of state is possible without
influencing all the other parts of the system
 in fact: there are no parts at all, only interacting
moments of structure that carry one another

 psychophysical isomorphism Wolfgang

 psychological facts and the brain events that underlie Köhler
them are similar in all of their structural characteristics (1887-1967)
 specifically: visual Gestalts result from a single Gestalt
process in which the whole optic sector from the retina
onwards is involved, including transverse functional
connections
 in fact: the brain described as a self-organizing physical
system
 Some early Gestalt history (3a)

Wertheimer, M. (1922). Untersuchungen zur Lehre

von der Gestalt, I: Prinzipielle Bemerkungen.
Psychologische Forschung, 1, 47-58.
- We need descriptions of conscious experience in terms of the
units people naturally perceive, rather than the artificial ones
imposed by standard scientific methods.
- We should not constrain ourselves to a piecemeal inquiry into
the contents of consciousness, building up higher entities from
constituent elements, using associative connections (“Und-
Summe”).
- Instead, what is given in experience “is itself in varying degrees
‘structured’ (‘gestaltet’), it consists of more or less definitely
structured wholes and whole-processes with their whole- Max
Wertheimer
properties and laws, characteristic whole-tendencies and whole- (1880-1943)
determinations of parts” (p. 14).
- The perceptual field does not appear to us as a collection of
disjointed sensations, but possesses a particular organization of
spontaneously combined and segregated objects.
 Some early Gestalt history (3b)

Wertheimer, M. (1923). Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der

Gestalt, II. Psychologische Forschung, 4, 301-350.

= an attempt to elucidate the fundamental principles of

that organization
- the most general principle = the so-called law of
Prägnanz: the perceptual field and objects within it will
take on the simplest and most encompassing
(“ausgezeichnet”) structure permitted by the given
conditions
• for Köhler this is just another example that phenomenal
Gestalten are like physical Gestalten: all processes in
physical systems, left to themselves, show a tendency to Max
achieve the maximal level of stability (homogeneity, Wertheimer
simplicity, symmetry) with the minimum expenditure of (1880-1943)
energy allowed by the prevailing conditions
- more specific principles: proximity, similarity, uniform
density, common fate, direction, good continuation and
“whole properties” (or “Ganzeigenschaften”) such as
closure, equilibrium, and symmetry
5.

ESSENCE OF BERLIN SCHOOL

 Against predecessors
Structuralism/empiricism
• sensations are the primary
units of mental life
• introspection: perceptual
experience must be analyzed
as combinations of elementary
sensations of physical stimuli
• percepts are associated
combinations of elementary
excitations
• perceptual organization is
based on perceptual learning,
past experience, intentions
• likelihood principle
Berlin school
• Gestalten are the primary units
of mental life
• experimental phenomenology:
perceptual experience must be
described in terms of the units
people naturally perceive
• percepts organize themselves
by mutual interactions in the
brain
• perceptual organization is
based on innate, intrinsic,
autonomous laws
• simplicity or minimum principle
 Against other Gestalt schools

Graz school Berlin school

(Meinong, von Ehrenfels, Benussi) (Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka)

• Gestalt qualities are more • Gestalten (structured

than the sum of the experiences) are different
constituent sensations from the sum of the parts

• one-sided dependency • two-sided or reciprocal

between parts and wholes dependency between parts
(the wholes depend on the and wholes (the whole is
parts, but the parts do not grasped before the individual
depend on the whole) parts enter consciousness)

• perception is “produced” on • perception “emerges”

the basis of sensations through self-organization
(non-mechanistically and
autonomously)
 Against other Gestalt schools

Leipzig school Berlin school

(Krüger, Sander, Jaensch) (Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka)

• stage theory: • no analysis into stages, but

“Aktualgenese”, microgenesis functional relations in the
emergence of Gestalts can be
specified by Gestalt laws of
perceptual organization

• mystic holism, segregated • holism integrated with

from natural science natural science (physical
Gestalten, isomorphism,
minimum principle)
6.

RISE AND FALL

 An open-ended research program

• Wertheimer (1922, 1923) basically outlined a whole research program.

• Once Wertheimer, Koffka and Köhler had acquired professorships at
major universities in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, they started to
work on this research program with their students.

• A flourishing period

• A few highlights:
– Kurt Gottschaldt on embedded figures (1926)
– Joseph Ternus on phenomenal identity (1926)
– Karl Duncker on induced motion (1929)
– Wolfgang Metzger on a homogeneous Ganzfeld (1930) and motion in depth
(1934)

• Expansion into other domains:

– other sense modalities (e.g., binaural hearing by Erich von Hornbostel)
– learning and memory (e.g., Otto von Lauenstein and Hedwig von Restorff)
– thought (e.g., Karl Duncker)
– action and emotion (by Kurt Lewin)
– neuropathology and the organism as a whole (by Adhemar Gelb and Kurt
Goldstein)
– film theory and aesthetics (by Rudolf Arnheim)
Second generation
 Decline and fall

• the findings obtained did not always fit the original

theories, which posed serious challenges to the
Gestalt framework
• even more devastating: the emergence of the Nazi
regime in Germany from 1933 to World War II
– many of the psychology professors at German universities
lost their posts because of the discrimination and
prosecution of Jews
– they emigrated to the U.S. to take on new positions there
– most did not do any new empirical work there
– most wrote books in which they outlined their views (e.g.,
Koffka, 1935; Köhler, 1940; Wertheimer, 1945)
– major exception:
• Köhler & Wallach (1944)
• Köhler & Held (1949)
 From speculation to facts

Köhler, W., & Held, R. (1949). The cortical correlate of pattern vision.
Science, 110, 414-419.

 previously: indirect evidence from “figural aftereffects” (with Hans

Wallach)
 now: first recordings of visual currents, picked up by an electrode at the
scalp of human observers
 from “electromotive forces” to “electrical field theory”

 flow of current is “relational”

 the field of distribution of current
flow is “molar”
 the characteristics of perceptual
organization correspond to the
distribution of current
 dense, continuous flow ~ figure
 interruption of flow or sharp
intensity gradient ~ contour
 From speculation to facts

Lashley, K. S., Chow, K. L., & Semmes, J. (1951). An examination of the

electrical field theory of cerebral integration. Psychological Review, 58,
123-136.
 more direct test of electrical field theory
 rationale: insulate part of a cortical field and test for consequent
disturbances of function
 metallic strips and pins inserted in macaque cortex
 almost no effect on post-operative retention of object discrimination
 End of electrical field theory

 similar study with slightly different methods but same results:

Sperry, R. W., Miner, N., & Myers, R. E. (1955). Visual pattern perception following subpial slicing
and tantalum wire implantations in the visual cortex. Journal of Comparative and
Physiological Psychology, 48, 50-58.
 Köhler’s reactions to these studies (pointing out several methodological
and conceptual shortcomings) were basically ignored
 devastating blow to
 electrical field theory
 basic isomorphism postulate of Gestalt theory
Situation in Germany
Situation elsewhere in Europe
7.

HISTORICAL EVALUATION
 Mixed evaluation

• On the one hand, signs of well-deserved respect

in the U.S. and in Germany
– Köhler’s honorary degrees in 1967 and his APA
presidency in 1957
– Wertheimer’s posthumous Wilhelm Wundt Medal of the
German Society for Psychology in 1983

• On the other hand, the Gestalt theorists’ ideas

were ambivalently received
– they raised central issues and provoked important
debates in psychology, theoretical biology, and other
fields
– their mode of thinking and research style
accommodated uncomfortably to the intellectual and
social climate of the postwar world
 Main reasons (Ash, 1995)

1. institutional, political, and biographical contingencies

– insufficient funding for Berlin school
– severe personal blows with the early deaths of Wertheimer in
1943, Koffka in 1941, Gelb in 1935, and Lewin in 1947
– 3 of Köhler’s most outstanding students (Karl Duncker, Otto
Lauenstein, and Hedwig von Restorff) all died young
– after they left Germany, the founders of Gestalt theory all
obtained positions where they could do excellent research but
could not train PhDs
– the situation in Germany was different: Metzger, Gottschaldt and
Rausch produced more students between them than Wertheimer,
Koffka and Köhler did, but relatively few carried on in the Gestalt
tradition
– they all broadened the scope of their research portfolio much
beyond traditional Gestalt topics, in the direction of
developmental psychology, educational psychology, sport
psychology, personality, clinical psychology, psychotherapy, and
so forth
 Main reasons (Ash, 1995)

2. conceptual issues
– language
• for rationalists: language constitutes meaning
• for Gestaltists: language expresses meaning that is already there in the
appearance or in the world

– applying Gestalt thinking to personality and social psychology

• based on analogy or metaphor
• but the further the metaphors were stretched, the harder it became to
connect them with Köhler’s concept of brain action

– a meta-theoretical impasse between the theoretical and research

styles of Gestalt theory and those of the rest of psychology
• Gestalt theory: non-mechanistic but scientific approach to holism
– the external world, its phenomenal counterpart, and the brain events
mediating interactions between them, all have the same structure or
function, according to the same dynamical principles
• the critics insisted on causal explanations: cognitive operations in the mind
or neural mechanisms in the brain
My own evaluative review

“the good”
contributions standing the test of time

“the bad”
ideas refuted by results, exaggerated claims

“the ugly”
important insights that are still difficult to
integrate in modern vision science
 The good

• research on perceptual grouping and figure-ground

organization has been able to build on the sophisticated
research methods available in vision science in general

• demonstrations with either very simple or confounded

stimuli were supplemented with real experiments, using
carefully constructed, sometimes also richer stimuli

• 100 years of research on perceptual grouping and

figure-ground organization has yielded a wealth of
knowledge regarding principles of perceptual
organization, their ecological foundations,
computational mechanisms, and neural underpinnings
 The good (ctd.)

• some progress has been made in linking these

aspects of perceptual organization to other
aspects of visual processing

• mid-level vision is now often conceived as a

relay-station between low-level vision and high-
level vision processes which interpret their
meaning
 The bad

• Gestalt theory was criticized for formulating new

laws for every factor that influenced perceptual
organization, and with little precision.

• To avoid a proliferation of “laws”, the law of

Prägnanz was proposed as the fundamental law
encompassing all the others but its formulation
was left intentionally vague:
– “psychological organization will always be as ‘good’ as
the prevailing conditions allow” (Koffka, 1935, p. 110)
– “one recognizes a resultant ‘good Gestalt’ simply by its
own ‘inner necessity’ ” (Wertheimer, 1923/1938, p. 83).
 The bad (ctd.)

• Köhler’s electrical field theory was proven wrong by

Lashley’s and Sperry’s experiments and the underlying
notion of psychophysical isomorphism turned out not to
be productive.

• No alternatives were found to replace the physical but

non-mechanistic foundations of Gestalt theory.

• With no testable quantitative models and no plausible

neural underpinning, the Gestalt principles remained
mere descriptions of interesting perceptual phenomena.
 The bad (ctd.)

• Claims about Gestalt principles being

preattentive, innate, and independent of
experience appear exaggerated:
– principles of grouping seem to operate at multiple
levels and figure-ground segregation can also be
affected by attention
– infants are already capable of grouping according to at
least some grouping principles, but developmental
trends regarding other grouping principles indicate that
visual experience does play a role as well
– recent studies with adult observers showed that past
experience can exert an influence on several aspects of
figure-ground perception
 The ugly

• Several Gestalt notions do not fit well with the rest of

what we know about vision.

• Modern vision science appears to be incommensurate

with “the fundamental ‘formula’ of Gestalt theory”
(Wertheimer, 1924/1938, p. 2)
– “There are wholes, the behavior of which is not
determined by that of their individual elements, but where
the part-processes are themselves determined by the
intrinsic nature of the whole.”

→ How can we understand the relationships between

parts and wholes in light of the visual cortical
hierarchy and dynamics?
 The ugly (ctd.)

• The convergence between psychophysical results

and natural image statistics seems to indicate
that the visual system is tuned to the properties
of its environment.
→ How can internal laws based on a general minimum
principle yield veridicality in the external world (or the
behavioral suitability or survival value of vision as our
user interface)?

• Establishing an integration of Gestalt theory

within modern vision science provides serious
challenges.
 Conclusions

• Gestalt theory is still relevant to current

psychology/vision science in several ways:
– proper emphasis on the emergence of structure in
perceptual experience and the subjective nature of
phenomenal awareness
– continuing challenge to some of the fundamental
assumptions of mainstream vision science and cognitive
neuroscience
– much progress has been made in the field of nonlinear
dynamical systems, both theoretically and empirically
 Conclusions (ctd.)

• rumors about the death of Gestalt psychology were

greatly exaggerated
– the field of research on perceptual grouping and figure-
ground organization is thriving
– progress has been tremendous compared to the situation
of 100 years ago

• significant challenges remain

– building on a research tradition of more than a century,
we can now reconsider some of the old puzzles at a much
more advanced scientific level now
– an open-ended research program
– the most important challenge: to better integrate this
research tradition with the rest of vision science
8.

SOURCES
 A century of Gestalt psychology
in visual perception

• 2 extensive reviews in 2012

– Wagemans, J., Elder, J. H., Kubovy, M., Palmer, S. E.,
Peterson, M. A., Singh, M., & von der Heydt, R. (2012). A
century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I.
Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization.
Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1172-1217. doi:
10.1037/a0029333
– Wagemans, J., Feldman, J., Gepshtein, S., Kimchi, R.,
Pomerantz, J. R., van der Helm, P., & van Leeuwen,
C. (2012). A century of Gestalt psychology in visual
perception: II. Conceptual and theoretical foundations.
Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1218-1252. doi:
10.1037/a0029334
 Oxford Handbook
of Perceptual Organization

SECTION 1. GENERAL
BACKGROUND
1. Wagemans, J. ― Historical and
conceptual background: Gestalt
theory.
2. Albertazzi, A. ― Philosophical
background: Phenomenology.
3. Koenderink, J. J. ― Methodological
background: Experimental
phenomenology.
 THANK YOU

JOHAN.WAGEMANS@PSY.KULEUVEN.BE

WWW.GESTALTREVISION.BE