Japanese gardens are widely appreciated all over the world for sophisticated, minimal compositions and for the calm yet profound atmosphere which they engender. How are the visual elements of a garden, its rocks, moss, and shrubs, interpreted by the brain, and how do gardens achieve particular expressive and artistic effects? In this paper we suggest how principles of visual psychology can be u...

Our first review article (Wagemans et al., 2012) on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Gestalt psychology focused on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. It concluded that further progress requires a reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is provided here. In particular, we review contemporary formulations of holism...

We see buildings but, do we understand their geometry? This paper is a perceptual approach to the comprehension of architectural composition. As we know, Gestalt psychology is concerned with the principle of simplicity in our perception, understanding by this the way simple patterns are “easier to see” because we are inherently predisposed to find them. Gestalt principles tell us the characteri...

The claims to bring back Gestalt theory into the Neurosciences research field have been laid on both theoretical and experimental grounds. The constraints upon which things look as they do are commonly held as explanatory and predictive phenomenological conditions that supposedly contribute to a better understanding of brain mechanisms underlying the perceptual world structures. On the other si...

Perceptual organization is a key issue of Vision Science challenging all its main approaches, be they computational, psychophysical, neurophysiological or phenomenological. It concerns the problem of why we perceive a world articulated in objects such as people, cities, houses, cars and trees, and not in differences of luminances, edges and bars, or in Wertheimer’s (1923) words: I stand at the ...

There is an apparent contradiction concerning configurational effects in visual information processing. Some studies have shown that when an array is organized into a "good" or unitary Gestalt, analysis of a single part of it is facilitated, while others have shown "good" arrays to impede search for a part. The three experiments reported here support the proposition that goodness of form can fa...

We present a new method for generating general object candidates for cluttered RGB-D scenes. Starting from an over-segmentation of the image, we build a graph representation and define an object candidate as a subgraph that has maximal internal similarity as well as minimal external similarity. These candidates are created by successively adding segments to a seed segment in a saliency-guided w...

The world (both natural and man-made) is constrained by physical laws to a finite number of basic patterns. Certain three dimensional relationships between features in a scene give rise to two dimensional relationships that are relatively viewpoint invariant and can be distinguished as non-accidental. Thus, those regularities observable in the image arise not by accident, but are projections of...

Previous studies have presented well-ordered collaboration structures of co-author pairs. Kretschmer and Kretschmer have shown that, for high impact SCI journals, the distributions of co-author pairs' frequencies can be considered to be a reflection of a social Gestalt. This study is an extension of that work to the social sciences, namely eleven journals in women's and gender studies. After ov...

Key Gestalt papers focused on the perception and interpretation of grouped objects, and smaller objects located within larger objects or environments. These largely relate to the tendency to group or organise objects which may or may not be associated. Their theories generally “stress[sed] the predominance of the whole over the parts”, proposing that observers tend to perceive any object only i...