Goodness of Pattern and Pattern Uncertainty 1

A visual configuration, or pattern, has qualities over and above those which can be specified by designating the physical properties of each element of the pattern. The Gestalt psychologists have particularly emphasized the fact that a pattern also has organization, that it exists as an entity. This Gestalt property does not exist in the same amount for all patterns, so we speak of the "goodness" of a pattern; and some patterns have more goodness than others. While many of the Gestalt principles of perception, such as proximity, similarity, continuation, symmetry, etc., have helped in understanding the nature of pattern goodness, there has not been a good unifying concept for the phenomenon. More recently, the concept of redundancy, as developed in information theory, has appealed to many psychologists as a possible unifying idea. Attneave (1954) developed a technique for estimating the redundancy of a single pattern, and Attneave and Arnoult (1956) described ways of generating visual forms with different amounts of randomness. Later Attneave ( 1957) showed that judged complexity of form was related to such things as number of turns in the figure, variability of angular change, and symmetry. Hochberg and McAlister (1953) and also Hochberg and Brooks (1960) have used a similar approach in studying the factors