I decided to use Gestalt Laws of Perception for my first blog. How we view the world we live in can be different from one another and can be difficult for us to understand. One thing is for certain, is that we try to make the world make sense and there are many ways we do so. I would like to talk about the law of similarity.
The law of similarity can be best described as how we naturally group like items together, and that can be done in many ways. Whether that is by color, by shapes we see, or by the sizes of items that are in front of us. I have the pleasure of having my four-year-old and currently as a family we are working on puzzles. I tried to put a puzzle piece that fit perfectly in a spot, but my daughter had taken the puzzle piece out. When asked why she did it, she said that the puzzle piece doesn’t go there. The colors scheme was off, but she saw that the piece fit perfectly but was not correct in her mind because she associated the like colors and started to group them together by likeness of color.
This law is something that I catch myself doing as well with organizing likeness of colors when putting away items in my kitchen and feel out of place when I don’t group items together. I believe it depends on the person, but this law can hold true for everyone, just depending on what the item is, and situation is as well. I am not sure why as there is still being research done on to truly understanding this, but it could be caused by how we naturally group like items and could help us understand the way are brain associated similarities.
This is a meaningful post. I think your connection between the Gestalt Laws of Perception and your daughter is wonderfully eloquent and metaphorical. It’s easy to get caught up in the complexity of these theories, concepts, and terminologies, but really the most fascinating thing about cognitive psychology, at least in my opinion, is that it manages to define the abstract. When you really get down to it, these cognitive processes begin when we are mere four-year-olds.
Your post made me think of the final law of perception: Pragnanz. It is defined as our tendency to, despite all the complexities of our environment (and even the complexities of the laws of perception), perceive our world in terms of simplicity. We gravitate towards symmetry and simplicity before all else. I think doing a puzzle in childhood is the perfect example of this. Our Lesson 3 Online Lecture used the word “subsume” to characterize Pragnanz encompassing all the other laws of perception. Perhaps a loosely related, meta, and potentially too-poetic thought is that our minds in childhood set the stage for who we become, and who we become subsumes all that we were. Your daughter noticing that the puzzle piece “doesn’t go” is a metaphor for quite a bit in life. Perception of something logical and obvious that doesn’t go, or of something we intuit, is perception nonetheless. And ultimately as Gestalt says, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I suppose this could be in reference to a puzzle, a human brain, or even a person’s whole life.
References
Goldstein, E.B. (2019). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience (5e ed.). Cengage.
Lesson 03 Online Lectures. (2023). PSYCH 256: Cognitive Psychology. PennState.