hello everyone and welcome back to the brain boost channel so today we're going to be talking about gestalt psychology what this means uh and certain examples of it so let's just dive right into the video so what is gestalt psychology this is just a school of thought that is based on perception and organization of information so to very loosely and generally define what gestalt psychology is is that our minds tend to perceive things as part of a whole and that we have a predisposed way or predisposed ways of organizing information in our brains so these are very loose uh definitions of gestalt psychology but hopefully once we get into these examples this will make more sense so the first example here is the figure ground perception so what this states is that we perceive images as figure and ground so figure is associated with an object and ground associates with the background so if we take this image for example one might say that they see a white vase on a black background so the figure here is the white vase and the ground is the black in the back conversely another person might say that they see two black silhouettes of faces looking at one another on a white background so in this case the figure are the two faces and the ground is the white background so the next one is the proximity principle and this states that objects that are close to one another are grouped together so if we take this image for example one might just say that they see you know a bunch of circles and a bunch of triangles here on this sheet but because of the way our brain organizes information you might actually notice that the circles are forming a shape and that is a diamond in the middle uh you'll and this is just based off of the proximity principle because all these circles are arranged so close to each other uh we tend to perceive it as a greater you know image or shape in this case and then you can kind of also say that we see a bunch of little triangles in the corner of a bunch of smaller triangles here so the principle of similarity is the next example and what this states is that objects that are similar to one another are grouped together so if we take this image for example let's just ignore the fact that there's a distinct line uh separating two separate images we're just going to pretend like this is one entire audience um but basically the principal similarity can be based off of size color etc so in this case if we have an audience at a football game for example we look into the audience and we will compartmentalize or organize what we see as based on their similarities in this case it's by color so we will group the yellow shirts together and the white shirts together and so we get this distinct these distinct almost two populations of fans in the audience the next one is the principle of closure so what this states is that when we see an image that may have missing parts to it our brain are going to fill these missing parts in and complete the image in our head so in this case you could say that there's just a bunch of pentagons on a sheet but because of principle of closure our brain is going to automatically almost fill in the image and say no no i see a soccer ball right here even though there are no lines around we just fill it in with our with our imagination really next up is the principle of good continuation so this states that people tend to perceive continuously flowing and smooth lines even if there is interruption so if we look here we notice that these are a bunch of squiggles or waves wavy lines here and what we see the pattern that we see here is that it's going we're following it almost as if these are two strands of hairs right we're following this first one going up then down then back up as a wave and then the next one going up then down and then back up it's almost as if it's two sets of waves just slightly staggered but this is because of the principle of good continuation because technically another way we could see this but we don't we could see it as this first uh point here that my um my pointer is at going up here and then we stop where they cross and it goes back down and then another point here and it goes back up here and then another point here it stops at this cut off where they cross and then it comes back up like this but we don't organize the shapes like that we're sorry we don't organize the lines like that we organize this as a continuously smooth flowing line here and here so that is principle of good continuation we can also see a little bit of principle of closure here see there are gaps here and even here there's a big gap and our brain could technically just fill it in we could easily just make a curve here make another one here make another one here make another one here make a nice big one here and a nice one there and we will continue the way the lines flow together in our heads and the last one is the principle of common fate so what this states i apologize if you hear my keyboard going crazy so what principle of common fate states is that objects that move together tend to be grouped together in our heads so you might see a flock of birds flying in one direction and you will group them together based off of their common fate so to speak same thing goes for fish if you're watching like a documentary for example and you see a a bunch of fish going in one direction you almost group them together like this image here so that is it for today's video make sure you like this video you comment any other videos that you would like to see from brain boost or any questions you have on the topic covered today make sure to subscribe to the channel for more videos from us and hit the notification bell to be notified every time we post