Original Contributions - Originalbeiträge GESTALT FACTORS IN HUMAN MOVEMENT COORDINATION1

Gestalt factors such as the principles of closure, nearest neighborhood (proximity), good continuation, and common fate, are widely regarded as being tailored and well-suited for guiding the perception of spatial and temporal patterns. In this view, Gestalt factors are rules that the brain uses for reducing the overwhelming complexity of the perceptual world. Or, speaking in terms of information theory, these rules allow for highly effective information compression (ATTNEAVE 1954). This is possible because, as a result of a long evolutionary history, these Gestalt principles represent implicit expectations of the perceptual apparatus concerning the regularities of the world. These regularities, or redundancies, are not – as such – in the world itself, but imposed by the perceiving system, or, as METZGER (1954) puts it: “Gestalt laws are the general aprioric conditions to make possible the experience of unity, diversity, and form, in KANT’s sense” (see KANT 1781). In order to perceive an organized world, the perceptual system creates information and reduces information as aspects of the same process, which is obviously designed to help us obtain an understanding of the world. This “understanding” is always “for us”, i.e., adapted to our needs and behavioral options as organisms and human beings.