Principles of grouping

The principles of grouping (or Gestalt laws of grouping) are a set of principles in psychology, first proposed by Gestalt psychologists to account for the observation that humans naturally perceive objects as organized patterns and objects, a principle known as Prägnanz. Gestalt psychologists argued that these principles exist because the mind has an innate disposition to perceive patterns in the stimulus based on certain rules. These principles are organized into five categories: Proximity, Similarity, Continuity, Closure, and Connectedness.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

Irvin Rock and Steve Palmer, who are acknowledged as having built upon the work of Max Wertheimer and others and to have identified additional grouping principles,^[5] note that Wertheimer's laws have come to be called the "Gestalt laws of grouping" but state that "perhaps a more appropriate description" is "principles of grouping."^[6]^[7] Rock and Palmer helped to further Wertheimer's research to explain human perception of groups of objects and how whole objects are formed from parts which are perceived.

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Voiceover: Imagine that you're sitting at home and you're watching a basketball game on your TV. What you're actually seeing are a bunch of still images put in front of one another and what you're doing is taking those still images and putting them together in your head and basically telling yourself that you're watching a fluid realistic basketball game. How was it that we're able to do this? This is what the gestalt principles basically attempt to address. Gestalt principles. The gestalt principles basically seek to explain how we perceive things the way we do. Why is it that we don't tell ourselves hey, the basketball is just a bunch of pictures but rather that it's a fluid realistic representation of a basketball game? There are several different laws or principles that the gestaltist came up with and we're gonna look at each one of these and look in an example. Over here we're gonna look at the law and over here we're gonna write down the definition. The first law or gestalt principle is the law of similarity. Law of similarity. The law of similarity basically says the items that are similar to one another are grouped together by your brain. Grouped together. What does this mean? Let's look at an example. In this example you can see that there are squares and there are circles. Basically there's a square here, there's a circle here and so on and so forth. Maybe the first thing that you noticed was that this image looks like there were a bunch of squares on top of one another and a bunch of circles on top of one another. In other words your brain naturally noticed a pattern. It naturally notice that the squares created these vertical column and these ... Sorry, these circles created this vertical column and these squares created these vertical column. Your brain naturally organized this picture in vertical columns rather than in this longer horizontal columns. This is what the first gestalt principle is saying is that things that are similar to one another, so circles will be grouped together by your brain. The second gestalt principle is the law of Pragnanz. Pragnanz. This basically says that reality is often organized or reduced to the simplest form possible. Reality is reduced to simplest form. What do I mean by this? Let's look at an example again here. Here you see five circles that are juxtaposed on top of one another. What the law of Pragnanz basically says is that we look a this image and what we do is break it down into five circles. Here's one circle, here's two circles. Why is it that we don't break it down into more complex shapes so we could look at this object and say okay, here's this weird diamondy ovally shape over here and then there's a semi circle over here, and then we've got ... Or you could say here's one line and then here's another line. We can look at this and break it down into much more complicated shapes but we don't. We look at it and we just notice that here's a circle and here's another circle and they're on top of one another. We're basically looking at this fairly complex set of lines and reducing it down to its simplest form which is five circles juxtaposed on top of one another rather than more complex shapes that are coming together to form this image. The third gestalt principle or law is the law of proximity. Law of proximity. This basically says that objects that are close to one another are grouped together. Grouped together. Let's look at an example for the law of proximity. Over here we see a bunch of circles. When you look at this image you naturally notice this pattern, rectangular pattern of circles and you notice this other rectangular horizontal pattern of circles. These circles are grouped closer together than this set of circles right here. Basically your brain ... Let me just erase this so you can see. Why is it that we didn't just look at this set of circles and kind of put them together? That's because these circles are closer together than these ones are. There's more of a distance here between the circles than there is over here. Smaller distance. We naturally look at the distance. We naturally look at how close different objects are and group the ones that are really close to one another together. The next law is the law of continuity. The law of continuity basically says that lines are seen as following the smoothest path. Lines are seen as following the smoothest path. Let's look at an example. In this example we see again a bunch of circles. When you look at these you kind of notice that there's this continuous flow in this set of circles rather than a flow this way. That's because the angle here is much less steep than this angle. Your brain naturally draws this line over here and notices that these circles are continuous whereas these ones are a little bit discontinuous. Another thing that your brain does when you're looking at this image is that it basically takes these circles and organizes them as one entity. It puts them together and notices a pattern that hey, these circles are forming this continuous line and it puts together and you group these circles in one category, in one mental category than these guys over here that are in their own separate category. That's what the law of continuity basically says. The final law or gestalt principle is the law of closure. Law of closure. Basically this is just saying that the objects grouped together are seen as a whole. We ignore gaps and complete contour lines. Let me just write down the definition. Objects grouped together are seen as a whole. Let's look at an example. Over here we see this angle over here, we see this angle, we see this weird Pacman-looking semi circle thing. Your mind naturally fills in this triangle. I don't know if you guys saw this but there's like this triangle here. There are gaps and your mind naturally fills in the gaps. It fills in the contour lines and you perceive this triangle. Let me just go ahead and remove that. You can see that even though there isn't actually any triangles in this image your brain is telling you hey, there's a triangle. You're noticing this triangle. That's what the law of closure is basically saying is that your mind is filling the missing information to create familiar shapes and images.

Proximity

The Gestalt law of proximity states that "objects or shapes that are close to one another appear to form groups". Even if the shapes, sizes, and objects are radically different, they will appear as a group if they are close.

Refers to the way smaller elements are "assembled" in a composition.
Also called "grouping", the principle concerns the effect generated when the collective presence of the set of elements becomes more meaningful than their presence as separate elements. (It also depends on a correct order for comprehension.)
Grouping the words also changes the visual and psychological meaning of the composition in non-verbal ways unrelated to their meaning.
Elements which are grouped together create the illusion of shapes or planes in space, even if the elements are not touching.
Grouping of this sort can be achieved with tone or value, color, shape, size, or other physical attributes.^{[citation needed]}

Similarity

The principle of similarity states that perception lends itself to seeing stimuli that physically resemble each other as part of the same object. This allows for people to distinguish between adjacent and overlapping objects based on their visual texture and resemblance. Other stimuli that have different features are generally not perceived as part of the object. An example of this is a large area of land used by numerous independent farmers to grow crops. The human brain uses similarity to distinguish between objects which might lie adjacent to or overlap with each other based upon their visual texture. Each farmer may use a unique planting style which distinguishes his field from another. Another example is a field of flowers which differ only by color.^{[citation needed]}

The principles of similarity and proximity often work together to form a Visual Hierarchy. Either principle can dominate the other, depending on the application and combination of the two. For example, in the grid to the left, the similarity principle dominates the proximity principle; the rows are probably seen before the columns.

Closure

The principle of closure refers to the mind's tendency to see complete figures or forms even if a picture is incomplete, partially hidden by other objects, or if part of the information needed to make a complete picture in the minds is missing. For example, if part of a shape's border is missing people still tend to see the shape as completely enclosed by the border and ignore the gaps. This reaction stems from the mind's natural tendency to recognize patterns that are familiar and thus fill in any information that may be missing.

Closure is also thought ^{[citation needed]} to have evolved from ancestral survival instincts in that if one was to partially see a predator their mind would automatically complete the picture and know that it was a time to react to potential danger even if not all the necessary information was readily available.

Good continuation

When there is an intersection between two or more objects, people tend to perceive each object as a single uninterrupted object. This allows differentiation of stimuli even when they come in visual overlap. Humans have a tendency to group and organize lines or curves that follow an established direction over those defined by sharp and abrupt changes in direction.^{[citation needed]}

Common fate

When visual elements are seen moving in the same direction at the same rate (optical flow), perception associates the movement as part of the same stimulus. For example, birds may be distinguished from their background as a single flock because they are moving in the same direction and at the same velocity, even when each bird is seen—from a distance—as little more than a dot. The moving 'dots' appear to be part of a unified whole. Similarly, two flocks of birds can cross each other in a viewer's visual field, but they will nonetheless continue to be experienced as separate flocks because each bird has a direction common to its flock.^{[citation needed]}

This allows people to make out moving objects even when other details (such as the objects color or outline) are obscured. This ability likely arose from the evolutionary need to distinguish a camouflaged predator from its background.

The law of common fate is used extensively in user-interface design, for example where the movement of a scrollbar is synchronised with the movement (i.e. cropping) of a window's content viewport; the movement of a physical mouse is synchronised with the movement of an on-screen arrow cursor, and so on.

Good form

The principle of good form refers to the tendency to group together forms of similar shape, pattern, color, etc. Even in cases where two or more forms clearly overlap, the human brain interprets them in a way that allows people to differentiate different patterns and/or shapes. An example would be a pile of presents where a dozen packages of different size and shape are wrapped in just three or so patterns of wrapping paper, or the Olympic Rings.

References

^ cf. Gray, Peter O. (2006): Psychology, 5th ed., New York: Worth, p. 281. ISBN 978-0-7167-0617-5
^ Wolfe et al. 2008, pp. 78, 80.
^ Goldstein 2009, pp. 105–107.
^ Banerjee 1994, pp. 107–108.
^ Weiten 1998, pp. 144.
^ Palmer, Neff & Beck 1997, pp. 63.
^ Palmer 2003, pp. 180–181.

Bibliography

Banerjee, J. C. (1994). "Gestalt Theory of Perception". Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychological Terms. M.D. Publications Pvt. Ltd. pp. 107–109. ISBN 978-81-85880-28-0.
Goldstein, E. Bruce (2009). "Perceiving Objects and Scenes § The Gestalt Approach to Object Perception". Sensation and perception (8th ed.). Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-0-495-60149-4.
Palmer, Stephen; Neff, Jonathan; Beck, Diane (1997). "Grouping and Amodal Perception". In Rock, Irvin (ed.). Indirect perception. MIT Press/Bradford Books series in cognitive psychology. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-18177-8.
Palmer, Stephen E. (2003). "Visual Perception of Objects". In Healy, Alice F.; Proctor, Robert W.; Weiner, Irving B. (eds.). Handbook of Psychology: Experimental psychology. Vol. 4. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-39262-0.
Weiten, Wayne (1998). Psychology: themes and variations (4th ed.). Brooks/Cole Pub. Co. ISBN 978-0-534-34014-8.
Wolfe, Jeremy M.; Kluender, Keith R.; Levi, Dennis M.; Bartoshuk, Linda M.; Herz, Rachel S.; Klatzky, Roberta L.; Lederman, Susan J. (2008). "Gestalt Grouping Principles". Sensation and Perception (2nd ed.). Sinauer Associates. ISBN 978-0-87893-938-1. Archived from the original on 2011-07-23.

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