Giuseppe Galli was born in Ravenna in 1933. In 1957 he graduated in Medicine in Bologna. Here he carried out his psychological education under the guidance of Professor Renzo Canestrari and in cooperation with the psychologists of the Gestalt school, particularly Wolfgang Metzger (University of Münster) and Edwin Rausch (University of Frankfurt am Main). In 1961 he became General Psychology ass...

In Sex and Temperament, Margaret Mead depicted the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as a gentle, nurturant people among whom warfare was "practically unknown." A few years later, however, Reo Fortune, her husband and cofieldworker, was to claim that warfare was "good Arapesh custom." This article reexamines this disagreement, addressing two issues: Did the Arapesh have a tradition of warfare?, an...

In this paper, we propose a new context-based method for object recognition. We first introduce a neurophysiologically motivated visual part detector. We found that the optimal form of the visual part detector is a combination of a radial symmetry detector and a corner-like structure detector. A general context descriptor, named GRIF (Generalized-Robust Invariant Feature), is then proposed, whi...

This paper presents a perceptual organization based method for describing, extracting and grouping generic edge features, called Generic Edge Tokens (GET). A GET is a perceptually significant image primitive which represents a class of qualitatively equivalent structure elements. A complete set of GETs includes both linear and non-linear segment classes and junctions of the segments. Edge trace...

The discipline of graph visualization produces pictorial representations of node–link structures. Much effort has been directed toward making such diagrams visually pleasing. A variety of aesthetic heuristics have been proposed, with the assumption that these will improve readability and understanding. We look at a perceptual basis for these heuristics, including Gestalt principles and Norman’s...

From the electrophysiology of retinal or cortical cells to the Gestalt law of organization of visual stimuli, there are a variety of levels for understanding vision and visual perception. In many cases, the visual phenomena to be understood consist of color, form, depth or movement. As can readily be grasped when considering depth or movement, space is often crucial information for the visual s...

The paper describes a series of experiments testing a recognition based computerized mug shot database system (gestalt based) for police use. The prototype is compared to the more traditional feature based database system. The gestalt based database was shown to perform significantly better than the feature based database when the quality of the signals was improved. In addition, the gestalt ba...

In this study, we investigated effects of having different perspectives in solving collaborative tasks. A simple reasoning task was given to several pairs of participants, each of whom discussed their views with their partner. Protocol analysis was performed to reveal how people exchange information with a partner who has a different perspective to achieve successful collaboration. In the exper...

Perceptual organization is a vague term sometimes defined as the process by which we perceive our surroundings as a coherent whole. There is considerable debate about the mechanisms that accomplish perceptual organization. There is also disagreement about the methods we use to study perceptual organization. We believe that some of this disagreement is related to a commonly accepted hierarchical...