Gestalt Psychology
Gestalt psychology was the European successor to structuralism. It
was founded by Wertheimer, Koffka, and Kohler. Wertheimer noticed the
apparent movement of telephone poles while sitting in a train, an
early example of the phi phenomenon. Gestalt psychologists were
extremely interested in perception and devised many rules to explain
perceptual phenomena. One of their main rules was, "the whole
consists of more than simply the sum of its parts."
The word gestalt needs explaining because it has no good
English translation. Close approximations include figure and percept,
but gestalt actually means more than that. A gestalt is
more like a readily perceptible figure, one that stands out readily.
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