Psych Essay 3

Submitted By hbazzi012
Words: 320
Pages: 2

As I’m walking around campus throughout the day, basic principles from the Gestalt perspective such as figure-ground, similarity, proximity, continuity, and closure & similarity go into action. A rose in a nearby garden catches my eye and I go to smell it. While looking at the rose from a distance I was able to focus on it using figure-ground relationships. The rose is the figure and everything else around it, in my mind, is moved to the background and habituated. A figure-ground relationship is the idea that the brain perceives objects as figures on a background. I keep walking and as I look around campus I notice four Asians, two male and two females walking together. However, my brain splits them up into two different groups because of similarity. My brain tells me that the males are similar and the females are similar and this, in turn, allows me to separate them. Similarity is the idea that our brains perceive things that look alike as units in a group. I head to the library to look at some books. While I’m there, I see chairs around tables. Rather than seeing all of the chairs as separate units, I perceive the chairs at each table as a group. This is because the chairs are in close “proximity” to each other. This idea of proximity causes our brains to perceive things that are close to each other as part of a group. I go to the parking lot to get my car. While I’m walking to the car, I see a compilation of dashes that I interpret as an arrow. I