gestalt

Gestault is translated to mean "unified whole," and it refers to humans' innnate visual perception of things and their tendancy to group things or organize things that they see. This term was coined by German psychologists in the 1920s at the Berlin School. Gestault breaks visual perception down into subcatagories or principals. The principals of Gestalt are:

*SIMILARITY- when objects look similar, people tend to group them together. Similarity's impact is offset by anomally, which is a totally dissimilar object grouped with other obects similar to one another.

*Continuation-This principal refers to an instance where one object is tied to another object or continues through one obect into another object, thus groping them.

*Closure-Closure occurs when an objects defining edges are inferred by objects. The human eye will assume, based on it's visual experiences, that those defining edges are there.

*Proximity-THis is an example of the eye perceiving objects as a group or a whole because of their closeness to one another. If a goup of objects are side by side in a somewhat organized way, they eye will see them as one unit.

*Figure and Ground-this principal refers to a persons tendancy to want to find a background in order to define a figure or object. Once a background or ground is established, it becomes very easy to figure out shapes that group together to form a familliar object.

The Gestalt theory is widely used for therapy tothis day. Gestalt has proven to be a great tool for dealing with autism and other types of behavioral psychotherepy.