The history of modern-day psychology dates back to the early 19th century. By the 19th century, 31 pairs of spinal nerves had been discovered, which connected the brain with different organs. Moreover, 12 known pairs of cranial nerves connected the brain to sensory organs. Until then, philosophers had actively discussed the mind, which remained the basis of psychology as a discipline. Psychology outgrew physiology and philosophy, emphasizing the scientific approach towards understanding the mind. Here we have listed a few notable researchers who have shaped the field of perception as we know it today. This is far from an exhaustive list, and we highly encourage you to understand the background history of perception for a detailed understanding of the major themes and trends in perception.
One of the foremost physiologists and physicists of that time was Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 – 1894). He studied the speed of nerve impulses by stimulating a motor nerve in a frog's leg. Helmholtz also studied the physiology of vision and audition. He invented the ophthalmoscope to examine the retina and study the physiology of vision.
Helmholtz is widely known in physiology as he proposed the trichromatic theory of vision that suggested the mixing and matching of three different primary colours: red, blue, and green, to produce colour vision. If you flash a red spotlight on a wall and then flash a green light such that it overlaps the red, the colours will "mix" and appear yellow (new colour). Helmholtz concluded that the eyes must have three different colour receptors (one for each colour). Incoming light of a specific wavelength was thought to excite these receptors to varying degrees, resulting in the impression of a particular colour.
Helmholtz also answered the question about how light becomes focused on the retina by proposing the concept of accommodation. Accommodation is when there is a change in the thickness of the lens as the eye focuses on objects that are either close or far away. He also examined the perception of depth and came up with the operation of binocular vision.
Helmholtz believed that the raw information processed by the sensory system itself is useless. Only when a specific set of sensory experiences is linked to particular outcomes does it become meaningful; he called this process unconscious inference. For example, in the case of a person approaching us, the retinal image of the person enlarges as they approach us, yet we interpret the individual as becoming closer rather than doubling or tripling in size. Therefore, he argued that we unconsciously infer that the person is getting closer as we know from experience that people do not actually expand or enlarge in size as they move towards us.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832 – 1920) was a student of Helmholtz and is often referred to as the father of psychology. He addressed nonphysical structures such as thoughts, experiences and emotions of the human mind, as well as the broader notions of how the mind is shaped by culture.
Edward Titchener (1867 – 1927) was Wundt's student who expanded on Wundt's original idea in the USA and believed that one could break down every experience into individual emotions and sensations. He termed it structuralism as it focused on studying the structure of the mind. He applied introspective methods to studying thoughts as well as physical sensations. Introspection is a process of examining and measuring one's own thoughts and mental activities. By using this method, Titchener wanted to understand how one can address the elements of the mind.
In contrast to the prevailing view of structuralism in the early days of psychology, many psychologists were trying to comprehend a different yet comprehensive foundation for the mind. Unlike Wundt and Titchener, William James (1842 – 1910) was interested in studying consciousness. James focused on how the mind allowed people to function in the real world. He objected to the structuralist point of view and came up with functionalism which was the study of how the mind allows people to adapt, live, work and play.
In addition to William James, the gestalt theorists in Germany were also trying to comprehend human experience differently yet holistically. One can roughly place the origin of gestalt around 1910 to 1912 when the German psychologist Max Wertheimer did his apparent motion experiment. However, one can trace Gestaltist influence back to German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant highlighted the role of past knowledge and cognitive categories in shaping our present experience. By the late nineteenth century, the philosopher Edmund Husserl's phenomenology had emphasized the significance of direct descriptions of human experiences over introspection. He believed descriptions found via introspection were artificial and could not adequately describe the nature of these experiences.
Wertheimer believed that we could not understand mental activities such as perceiving and sensing by breaking them down into smaller pieces. He believed people were predisposed to seek patterns in the sensory information available to them. He became fascinated with apparent motion, in which a stationary object appears to move under certain circumstances. For example, five light bulbs flashing with a 60 msec interval between them would look like one continuous light moving down the series. There would be five separate sensory events (five bulbs flashing), but the perception would be a single continuous event (one light moving). He argued that we perceive the whole, meaningful figures rather than the components that come together to make the whole. He termed this the Phi Phenomenon to avoid the connotation of an "apparent" motion, as the motion was illusory. This approach was, thus, an assault on previous thought processes such as structuralism which focused on breaking down processes.
Apart from the various concepts in perception, such as figure-ground segregation and the principles of perceptual organization, Gestalt theorists are widely known for issues of meaning and value in science that the then-existing scientists had left out as outside the purview of scientific enquiry. However, this did not mean that they were not aware of the changes in natural science. Instead, they emphasized searching for science for human life and experience beyond mechanistic psychology. For example, they also extensively stressed thinking and problem-solving in a holistic sense. In order to demonstrate, these small vignettes are presented about two famous gestalt theorists – Wolfgang Kohler and Max Wertheimer.
Wolfgang Kohler did not entirely agree with how the then prevailing psychologists conceived thinking in a step-by-step, mechanical approach to problem-solving. Instead, consistent with his gestalt orientation, he maintained that problems are solved when people can see the whole problem and rearrange the problem's components into a new and meaningful configuration. Kohler believed that once the individual had reconfigured the pieces, the solutions had a perceptual feel, which occurred swiftly. He labelled this process "insight." He placed a chimpanzee named Sultan in a cage to study this process. Kohler put a banana outside his cave, and his task was to retrieve the banana. Kohler provided him with two hallowed bamboo sticks with slightly different diameters. Sultan quickly recovered the banana using a stick when placed just out of his reach. Then the problem was made more difficult as the experimenter placed the banana just out of reach of Sultan's extended arm with the stick in his hand. After about an hour of trying to get the banana, Sultan had a sudden 'aha' moment or a sudden flash of insight. He joined the two sticks and retrieved the banana. Kohler concluded that solutions occurred quickly and after the reconfiguration of all the elements in a novel way with insight. Köhler's study provided a new way of thinking about our approach to learning and problem solving, and it went beyond using simple puzzle boxes and mazes to study animals.
Similar to Kohler, In his book Productive Thinking (1945), Max Wertheimer applied gestalt concepts to education. He distinguished productive thinking from rote learning, which he described as lacking in comprehension, inflexible, readily forgotten, and only applicable in restricted settings. When a student must employ problem-solving abilities, he uses gestalt (wholistic) principles to learn. As a result, learning is adaptable, long-lasting, and applicable to various contexts (transfer of training). Students should rearrange the problem in various ways to develop productive thinking until a solution arises based on understanding. Using productive thinking, when students are taught how to find the rectangle's area using the concept of grids, they will apply unit area and find areas of non-standardized figures such as a parallelogram.
The wholism of the gestalt theorists was not without precedence. By the early 20th century, the idea of force fields was effectively entrenched in physicists' thoughts. For example, Max Planck emphasized how the total force field determined the nature of the relationships between the components of the field. For example, a magnetic field represents the force that creates an overall pattern of interrelationships between elements that cannot be understood by analyzing each element in the overall magnetic field. In this respect, the physicist Ernst Mach's description of certain "space-forms," which resisted analysis into basic elements, holds prominence. The idea can be explained as follows: for example, a square is made up of four perpendicular lines. These lines may change in shape, but the relationship among those four lines must stay the same for us to interpret it as a square. Therefore, the overall relationship is what counts when identifying the square, not the individual components. This is one of the key ideas in the gestalt school of thought, which recognizes the irreducibility of fields into their elements.
Christian Von Ehrenfels agreed with Mach and spoke about entities/objects having form quality which is the overall quality of some entity which exists over and above its individual components. For example, a song played in different keys or using different instruments will have notes that change depending on the key, but the song's melody itself does not change. In addition, we don't just hear individual notes but the whole melody.
Franz Brentano, a notable philosopher, highlighted that it was essential to understand how the mind operates to create experiences. Therefore, he argued that rather than focusing on how we sense an object (which is what Titchener concentrated on), he believed that we needed to understand how an individual perceives an event and what personal significance the event hold.
He developed the idea of act psychology which was the study of mental acts and not mental contents, with the perception of some event. For example, one should not analyze an event into its elements but examine the act of perception (i.e., how the individual perceives the event and what the event means to the individual).
Brentano's student Carl Stumpf was a talented musician and is credited for his work with auditory perception. In addition, he is also recognized widely for his work on phenomenology and philosophy. He was also the founder of the Berlin Institute of Psychology which gave rise to the Gestalt school of Psychology by Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, and others. The history of the gestalt school is much more nuanced, and its legacy continues beyond psychology into the discipline of communication design.
