Unit 3. Perception:Why Do Things Look the Way They Do?

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, said that

the great question of perception is: “Why do things look the way they do?”

At first the question seems almost silly. We are tempted to answer, “Because

things are they way they are.” It would seem that tall things look tall because they

are tall. And distant things look distant because they are distant. On the other

hand, why does the Moon look larger just above the horizon than it does when

it’s overhead? It hasn’t gotten any bigger, or any closer. And, if a series of disconnected dots are arranged in the pattern of, say, the letter F, it looks like the letter,

not a bunch of disconnected dots—which, it could be argued, it actually is.

Visual images on your retina are upsidedown.

Nonetheless, you perceive them as right side up. At the level of sensation, it’s

an inverted world. At the level of perception, the world doesn’t look inverted at all.

Koffka’s question does not have to be limited to the sense of vision. The same

question could be adapted to the other senses. The principles set forth here, largely in connection with vision, can be readily applied to perception in general.

Sensation is the raw data of experience. Perception, on the other hand, is the organization and the meaning we give to primitive information. It can be said with some degree of confidence that we use sensory information to create a psychological world.

Returning to Koffka, he said that there is a distinction between the geographical

world and the psychological world. The geographical world is the actual world “out there,” the world as defined and described by physics. The psychological world is the world “in here,” the world as experienced by the subject. Although common sense usually says it’s the so-called “real world” or physical world that determines our behavior, it can be argued that common sense isn’t sufficiently analytical. Reflection suggests that we behave in terms of what we perceive to be true, not necessarily in terms of what is actually true.

If ice is thin in the physical world, and it is solid in your psychological world, you

are likely to skate on it. And, of course, you may make a serious mistake as a result.

In sum, it can be argued that we act to a large extent in terms of our perceptions.

And it is for this reason that the study of perception is a basic one in psychology.

The Gestalt Laws: Is Our Perception of the World Due to Inborn Organizing Tendencies?

Imagine that you are looking up and you see a single bird flying in the sky. The

bird is a figure, a well-defined perceptual object tending to stand out. The sky is

ground (or background), the perceptual field that surrounds the figure. This is

figure-ground perception. One of the features of this kind of perception is that

the figure is usually smaller than the ground and tends to be seen as coming forward

from the ground. Other examples include seeing a button on a blouse, a

book on a table, or a car on the road.

It can be argued that this kind of perception, the ability to distinguish a figure

from a field, is an inborn organizing tendency. We aren’t taught to do it. We probably

start doing it spontaneously early in infancy. An infant reaching for a milk

bottle suggests to us that he or she perceives the bottle as a perceptual object, a figure

in a field. Figure-ground perception is probably the most fundamental organizing

tendency we possess.

Keep in mind once again that perception does not necessarily reflect the structure

of the world itself. For example, a word printed in black ink on a white page

is perceived as slightly in front of the white surface. We are tempted to think that

this is because the word is “on” the page. But imagine that a black piece of paper

is covered with a stencil. The entire page is inked white, with the exception of the

word. Now, from a physical point of view, the white ink is on the black surface.

Nonetheless, unless carefully studied, the word, emerging in black, will be perceived

as slightly forward and on the page.

Various illusions demonstrate that figure-ground perception is reversible

under some conditions. The example of the word on a page and the illusions all

strongly suggest that figure-ground perception is a mental construction, not necessarily

a fact about the physical world.

Max Wertheimer is the father of Gestalt psychology. Adding to figure-ground perception, Wertheimer proposed a set of supplemental inborn organizing tendencies, or Gestalt laws. (The Gestalt laws are also traditionally called innate tendencies, which simply means “inborn.” The words innate and inborn can be used interchangeably.)

First, proximity refers to the nearness of the elements that make up a perception.