03 Cognitive Psychology: Module 7

Module 7: Top-Down Processing and Visual Perception Gestalt Principles of Perception In the early part of the 20th century, Max Wertheimer (1912) published a paper demonstrating that individuals perceived motion in rapidly flickering static images—an insight that came to him as he used a child’s toy tachistoscope. Wertheimer, and his assistants Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, who later became his partners, believed that perception involved more than simply combining sensory stimuli (i.e., bottom-up processing). This belief led to a new movement within the field of psychology known as Gestalt psychology. The word gestalt literally means form or pattern, but its use reflects the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the brain creates a perception that is more than simply the sum of available sensory inputs, and it does so in predictable ways. Gestalt psychologists translated these predictable ways into principles by which we organize sensory information. In other words, there are predicable top-down processing effects for how we interpret ambiguous stimuli. As a result, Gestalt psychology has been extremely influential in the area of sensation and perception (Rock & Palmer, 1990).