Furthermore, the border separating the two segments is perceived as belonging to the figure rather than to the ground, and as delineating the figure's shape as its contour, whereas it is irrelevant to the shape of the ground. The areas of the figure and the ground usually do not appear juxtaposed in a common plane, as in a mosaic, but rather as stratified in depth: there is a tendency to see the figure as positioned in front, and the ground at a further depth plane and continuing to extend behind the figure, as if occluded by it. The figure has an object-like character, whereas the ground has less perceptual saliency and appears as 'mere' background. The two components are perceived as two segments of the visual field differing not only in color, but in some other phenomenal characteristics as well. This type of field organization has a number of remarkable features, first described in the work of Rubin (1915/1921), predating Wertheimer's publication. This figure-ground articulation may seem obvious, but it is not trivial. In such cases the visual field is perceived as articulated into two components, the figure (patch) on the ground (surround). A simple case of an inhomogeneous field is a display with a patch of one color surrounded by another color, as in Figure 1. If the visual field is homogeneous throughout, a situation labeled as Ganzfeld (German for 'whole field'), it has no consistent internal organization. For a modern textbook presentation, including more recent contributions, see Palmer (1999). The Gestalt principles were introduced in a seminal paper by Wertheimer (1923/1938), and were further developed by Köhler (1929), Koffka (1935), and Metzger (1936/2006 see review by Todorović, 2007). In visual perception, such forms are the regions of the visual field whose portions are perceived as grouped or joined together, and are thus segregated from the rest of the visual field. These principles mainly apply to vision, but there are also analogous aspects in auditory and somatosensory perception. Gestalt principles aim to formulate the regularities according to which the perceptual input is organized into unitary forms, also referred to as (sub)wholes, groups, groupings, or Gestalten (the plural form of Gestalt). Gestalt is a German word meaning 'shape' or 'form'. How do we accomplish such a remarkable perceptual achievement, given that the visual input is, in a sense, just a spatial distribution of variously colored individual points? The beginnings and the direction of an answer were provided by a group of researchers early in the twentieth century, known as Gestalt psychologists. When we look at the world, we usually perceive complex scenes composed of many groups of objects on some background, with the objects themselves consisting of parts, which may be composed of smaller parts, etc. Gestalt principles, or gestalt laws, are rules of the organization of perceptual scenes. Dejan Todorovic, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
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