Abstract
The Gestalt psychology no longer exists as a school. Nevertheless, still today its lesson cannot be ignored. In this paper the concept of primacy of the whole over parts, of field, and of auto-organisation are identified as the main issues of Gestalt psychology, issues that determined a true turning point in the history of psychology in the present century. It is shown how the Gestalt ideas have deeply influenced the contemporary cognitive psychology, and how such an influence has been particularly evident in the last years. Two examples are presented: the first shows the place of the concept of field in contemporary theorising about perceptual invariants — especially with the so-called geometric psychology developed by Hoffman; the second introduces the theory of dynamic formation and recognition of patterns, as elaborated in the framework of synergetics by Haken; it is shown that such a theory can be seen as a natural development of the Gestalt ideas on auto-organisation.
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Luccio, R. (1993). Gestalt problems in cognitive psychology: Field theory, invariance and auto-organisation. In: Roberto, V. (eds) Intelligent Perceptual Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 745. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57379-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57379-8_1
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