Hi, I'm Eric Vammon, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia. I teach a course on the history of psychology there, and today I want to give you an introduction to one of the classic schools of psychology called Gestalt psychology. I do have a longer lecture on this, which I'll link at the end of this video, in which you can hear what I actually say in my course on the history of psychology. But today what I want to do is just cover briefly who the people are behind Gestalt psychology and what the main ideas of Gestalt psychology are.
First, let me say right away that Gestalt Psychology should not be confused with Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt Therapy was developed by a guy named Fritz Perls in the 1960s, and it has some linkage to Gestalt Psychology, perhaps mainly through the name, but really it was 50 years before that that Gestalt Psychology was formed, and Gestalt Therapy had very little intellectually to do with what Gestalt Psychology is. Geschalt psychology was developed by three German psychologists in the 1910s. Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Kafka. Now, the way the story begins is that Max Wertheimer in 1910 was taking a train, and as he rode on the train, he looked out his window and saw images passing by, and the way that things flickered on and off as he was looking out the window made him think about how he was perceiving motion.
And at the next stop, he got off, and bought himself a toy stroboscope like you see here. Stroboscopes had actually been around since the 1930s. This one is actually a phenakistoscope, which was also called a stroboscope.
And so what happened was that Max Wertheimer took this stroboscope to his hotel room and studied it for a while, trying to do experiments, trying to understand what it was. And what was really spellbinding about the stroboscope and had been since the 1830s, was the way that you could see motion even though there wasn't any motion actually going on. You could look through this and see a horse riding or a person jumping up and down, and you can actually see it's just a bunch of still images that are flickering around at a very fast rate.
To examine this phenomenon more systematically, when he got back to the University of Frankfurt, he was able to obtain a tachistoscope, or a t-scope is easier to say, and there he was able to study this, like I said, in a laboratory setting. He found that if he flashed two lights on and off, For 30 milliseconds or less, people perceived it as being the same light and it didn't move. But if you went ahead and presented it for 60 milliseconds in each of the two lights, people perceived it as if the light was bouncing back and forth.
And so people saw motion where there wasn't actually any emotion. And he labeled this the phi phenomenon. The phi phenomenon actually forms the basis of how we see movement in all sorts of different kinds of media.
If you think about the fact that when you watch a film, you're actually seeing a series of still images that are being presented one at a time, around 30 milliseconds each, and then what's happening is you're stitching them together and seeing movement when there actually isn't any movement being presented to you. Wertheimer's research assistants at the time were two recent PhDs from the University of Berlin, Wolfgang Kuhler and Kurt Kafka, and they served not only as his experimenters, but also as his subjects, as they... did more work on the phi phenomenon.
Before I tell you more about Gestalt psychology, let's go ahead and just look at these three individuals in a little bit more detail and talk about their individual careers. Max Wertheimer was born in Prague and went to the University of Prague to study law, but he shifted from law to philosophy and started attending lectures in psychology. And then he went to Berlin where he studied with Carl Stumpf.
He moved to the University of Würzburg in 1904. And then he did his dissertation on lie detection. For the next six years he held positions at the universities of Prague, Vienna, and Berlin. He was at Frankfurt from 1910 to 1916, then he went to the University of Berlin from 1916 to 1929, back to Frankfurt as a full professor in 1929 to 1933, and then at the age of 53 he moved to the United States to the New School for Social Research in New York City with his wife and three children.
He didn't know any language but German, but he was teaching English in a few months. He wrote about truth, ethics, democracy, and freedom in various articles that were published as a collection with Albert Einstein writing the foreword. He wrote one book in his career called Thinking, but he died before it was published of a coronary embolism. Wolfgang Köhler was born in Estonia and received his doctorate in 1909 from the University of Berlin with Carl Stumpf again as his advisor.
He then went to the University of Frankfurt, as I said, to work with Wertheimer. His work was interrupted in 1913 when the Prussian Academy of Sciences invited him to go to its anthropoid station on Tenerife, which is on one of the Canary Islands, to study chimpanzees. Shortly after his arrival, World War I broke out, and his stay on Tenerife ended up being prolonged for seven years.
While he was there, Kuhler concentrated on his study on the nature of learning in chimpanzees. He summarized these observations in a fantastic book called The Mentality of Apes that was published in 1917. One historian of psychology has suggested that perhaps while Wolfgang Kuhler was there at Tenerife, he was actually doing some spying for the German government during the war, during World War I. But a lot of this is sort of circumstantial evidence, but it's an interesting theory nonetheless. Upon his return to Germany, Kuhler accepted a professorship at the University of Göttingen in 1921. But in 1929, he went to Berlin to succeed Stumpf as the director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, which was a prestigious appointment. He ended up spending some years visiting Clark University in the United States from 1925 to 1926 and Harvard in 1934 to 1935. He wrote a book called Gestaltpsychologie that was written in English in 1929. Back in Germany, the Nazis were harassing institutions of higher learning and professors, and Kuhler became openly critical of the fatherland.
He wrote an article in 1933 criticizing the treatment of the Jews. He immigrated in 1935 to the US. He lectured at Harvard for one year and then accepted an appointment at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement in 1958. He wrote several books in his lifetime.
He moved to New Hampshire upon his retirement and became associated with Dartmouth. He lectured at various European universities. He had various honors like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the APA, Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, and even the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1959. Kurt Kafka was born in Berlin.
He received his doctorate at the University of Berlin with Stumpf again as his advisor, then served as a research assistant at Frankfurt. He taught at the University of Gießen until 1924. He came to the U.S. then, holding visiting professorships at Cornell and Wisconsin, before accepting a position at Smith College in Massachusetts, where he remained until his death. In 1922, he published an article in Psychological Bulletin titled An Introduction to Gestalt Theory, which erroneously led many Americans to believe that Gestalt psychology was just only about perception, a myth that has kind of persisted until today. The truth was that besides perception, these Gestalt psychologists were interested in many philosophical issues, as well as issues about learning and thinking.
The reason for their early concentration on perception was that Wilhelm Wundt, who was sort of the reigning king of psychology at the time, was concentrating on perception. And so he became their primary focus of attack. That's why they worked on so much on perception in early years.
Kafka published in 1921 an important book on child psychology. In 1935, he published Principles of Gestalt Psychology, which was intended to be a systematic presentation of gestalt theory. The latter book was dedicated to Köhler and Wertheimer in gratitude for their friendship and inspiration. Let's go ahead and talk about some of the key elements of Gestalt Psychology. So to kind of understand what the novel contribution of Gestalt psychology was, let's go back to that phenomenon that Wertheimer first focused on, the phi phenomenon.
One of the interesting variations of the original experiment that Wertheimer and his assistants worked on was the fact that they could show that if they just turned the lights in different orders on on and off, like if you put three lights on instead of just two, you could make it look like the lights were going clockwise or counterclockwise. Again, even though no lights were actually moving, the flashing of the lights in that particular order one way and then back the other direction would go ahead and make you perceive that the lights were actually moving in a clockwise or counterclockwise order. Well, how could you explain this?
The Gestalt psychologist said, well, you didn't have any learning experience for you to rely on. You couldn't go back and say that there was something in the past where you learned that when lights flickered on and off in this direction that this would make it look like they were moving. Instead, you'd have to say that that can't be something that you would have learned just because of some direct trial and error learning.
Instead, what they thought was that you must be perceiving some sort of gestalt or hole about that particular flickering of the lights on and off. So if the experience of psychological phenomena could not be explained by sensory processes, inferences, or fusions, how could it be explained? The gestaltist's answer was that the brain contains...
structural fields of electrochemical forces that exist prior to the sensory stimulation. Upon entering such a field, sensory data both modify the structure of the field and are modified by it. What we experience consciously results from the interaction of the sensory data and the force fields in the brain.
The situation is similar to one in which metal Particles are placed into a magnetic field. The nature of the field will have a strong influence on how particles are distributed, but the characteristics of the particles will also influence the distribution. For example, larger, more numerous particles will be distributed differently with the field than smaller, less numerous particles.
In the case of cognitive experience, the important point is that the fields of brain activity transform the sensory data and give that data characteristics that it would not otherwise possess. According to this analysis, the whole exists prior to the parts, that is those individual sensations, and it's thus the whole that gives meaning to the parts, that helps us interpret them. So that leads us to psychophysical isomorphism.
The Gestaltists introduced this concept of psychophysical isomorphism, which Kuhler described as, experienced order in space is always structurally identical, with a functional order in the distribution of underlying brain processes. This stresses the facts that the force fields in the brain transform incoming sensory data and that it is transformed data that we experienced consciously. It was believed that although these patterns of perceptual and brain activity might have some similarity, the two represent totally different domains and therefore couldn't be identical.
So therefore you're not going to find exactly the process mapping onto an exact set of neurons, for instance, firing in the brain. Top-down versus bottom-up. According to the Gestaltists, organized brain activity dominates our perceptions, not the stimuli that enters into that activity.
For that reason, the whole is more important than the parts, thus reversing one of psychology's oldest traditions. The Gestaltists said that their analysis proceeded the top to the bottom, instead of from the bottom to the top. as had been the tradition.
So this distinction between whether or not we do top-down or bottom-up processing, we probably today think it's a bit of both, but at this point the Gestaltists had introduced this and it became quite controversial. One of the ways you can kind of see how this top-down versus bottom-up processing is how they dealt with what they called perceptual constancies and gestalten. So perceptual constancy refers to the way we respond to objects as if they were the same. even though the actual stimulation our senses receives may vary greatly. The empiricists explained these as the result of learning.
The sensations provided by objects seen at different angles, positions, and levels of illumination are different, but through experience, we learn to correct for these differences and to respond to the objects as the same. The Gestaltists disagreed. Kuhler, for example, asserted that constancies are a direct reflection of ongoing brain activity.
and not a result of sensation plus learning. The reason we experience an object as the same under varied conditions is that the relationship between that object and other objects remains the same. Because this relationship is the same, the field of brain activity is also the same, and therefore the mental experience or the perception is the same. This explanation then is simply an extension of their notion of psychophysical isomorphism. And there were all sorts of constancies that they talked about when they talked about perception such as color, shape and size.
So, the idea here is that you can look at these different stimuli and for example these triangles and experience them all as triangles because even though they're not completed triangles, you see it as a triangle and therefore your mind closes it in and closes the parts that are missing on that triangle. On the next one over to the right, you can see similarity. And the idea here is that our brain sees some of these dots going together and other dots being different from them because of the way they physically look.
So we automatically group them when we look at them, that we have this field of brain activity that's being activated by the similarity gestalten. And then we have some other examples here, like lower left, you can see proximity, that we tend to group things as being the same that are together physically. Things that are enclosed and like in a box that you see there in the middle get grouped together than the things that are not in that box and so on.
So, these are the kinds of things that they talked about. These perceptual consciences is evidence that they don't come from learning, they come from the fact that our brain is activated by these sensations and we group them as a whole and we respond then as the fact that these objects are alike because they're, you know, hanging out together or they look physically alike. So let me just say in closing a little bit about the legacy of Gestalt psychology.
One of the followers of Gestalt psychology who came along in the next generation was Kurt Levine. Kurt Levine actually became one of the important founders of modern social psychology, and thus a lot of the early social psychologists used Gestalt psychology in their way of thinking about social phenomenon. For instance, Kurt Levine actually thought of social behavior as being the result of different forces in a force field just the way the Gestalt psychologists had talked about field theory. And so as such he developed these explanations around trying to figure out where a person was in their life space and how different forces like their personality and situation had an impact on their social behavior.
And thus you can see ideas that come from people like Fritz Heider, Leon Festinger, and other early social psychologists who use these gestalt principles, these gestalt ideas in their theoretical approaches. So that's all I have at this particular presentation is a brief introduction to gestalt psychology. Again, if you'd like to hear more about this and have a more in-depth discussion, I do have a fuller lecture about this in my history of psychology course.
You can find the link here and you can go ahead and watch that if you'd like to have more. You'll see that I have several videos here on the history of psychology, psychology and statistics, social neuroscience. And I also talk about issues around academia and being a student. So if you're interested and you like this video, please consider subscribing and I thank you for watching. Bye!