A Brief Debate on Perception as Used In Gestalt Psychology
Perception is involved in all our interactions with the world surrounding us, implying the recognition of environmental stimuli as well as our response to these stimuli, which makes the matter of study of the Gestalt psychology.
The perception process involves plenty and diverse psychological scenes and relies on integration over space and time. To be more specific, if a person looks at an object and then turns away, that person still knows that the object is there, even if he or she cannot see it. This implies people having an inner model of the outer world.
Being such a complex process, perception can be divided in more levels. David Marr claims that most of the problems people arise when speaking about perception are in fact fake problems; they can be fully understood if you look at them at the right level of abstraction.
According to the Gestalt psychology, we should divide perception according to the flow of information. In doing so, the first level of interaction that takes place within perception is the sensation; then we will pass through some intermediary stage, very close to what we understand as perception, and the final stage will be the classification process.
The sensation is the stage when physical energy provided by stimuli (such as light, for example) is transformed into neural activity. There are two types of stimuli: the distal stimuli and the proximal stimuli. The first category of stimuli is related to the physical object while the second category is related to the optical projection on the retina.
The stage of perception occurs when the information from the neural inputs is transformed and organized, the final purpose being the extraction of attributes of the input, which can later be transformed into patterns and forms. Here is where the Gestalt psychology interferes. The Gestalt laws explain how the neural input is processed, grouped and seen by our perception system.
The classification stage is when people assign objects to classes. It depends a lot on our experience and knowledge.
People use Gestalt laws to group objects, to fill in gaps of information and find patterns. These laws explain the process of perception and how people tend to see wholes instead on their component elements.
Gestalt psychology is built on the idea that the whole is much more than the sum of its parts and helps us see how perception takes places and better understand how our mind works.