gestalt

Gestalt, from the German gestalt meaning "shape" or "form," is a foundational concept in psychology that emphasizes organized wholes over the mere sum of parts. Emergent in the early 20th century, it developed through the work of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka, who studied how people perceive patterns, motion, and structure. The movement arose in opposition to elementist approaches that analyzed sensory experience by breaking it into discrete components. Its early experiments on apparent motion (the phi phenomenon) helped establish the idea that perception is inherently organized by the mind.

Core ideas of gestalt theory include the laws of perceptual organization: proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, figure-ground discrimination, symmetry, and the law of Pragnanz, or good figure. These principles describe how the cognitive system tends to group elements into coherent wholes and to select the simplest, most stable interpretations of sensory input. Gestalt psychology emphasizes holistic processing, arguing that cognitive phenomena cannot always be explained by summing individual parts.

Influence and legacy: The approach shaped research in perception, problem solving, and cognitive psychology, and has informed design, typography, art, and human-computer interaction by providing practical guidelines for how users perceive layouts and interfaces. Although later theories integrated many gestalt concepts within broader cognitive frameworks, gestalt psychology is regarded as a major historical influence rather than a comprehensive theory today. The term also appears in related areas such as Gestalt therapy, a psychotherapeutic tradition focusing on awareness and present-centered experience, which draws on gestalt ideas but is distinct from experimental gestalt psychology.