Design of educational multimedia rarely starts from scratch, but rather by attempting to reuse existing software. Although redesign has been an issue in research on evaluation and on learning objects, how it should be carried out in a principled way has remained relatively unexplored. Furthermore, understanding how empirical research on information and communication technologies (ICT) should fe...

Gestalt Algebra gives a formal structure suitable for describing complex patterns in the image plain. This can be useful for recognizing hidden structure in images. The work at hand refers to the laws of perceptual psychology. A manifold called the Gestalt Domain is defined. Next to the position in 2D it also contains an orientation and a scale component. Algebraic operations on it are given fo...

Six experiments compared the Gestalt processing that mediates infant reaching and looking behaviors. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the positioning and timing of 8- and 9-month-olds' reaching was influenced by remembered relative motion. Experiment 2 suggested that a visible gap, without this relative motion, was not sufficient to produce these effects. Experiment 3 found that 6- and 7-month-ol...

In everyday life, we often encounter groupings of objects. It could be a group of products kept on a retail shelf, food items in a shop window or depictions of groups of objects or people in an advertisement. However, very little attention has been paid to how these different groupings could influence consumer decisions. The main aim of this article is to study the influence of such groupings o...

The visual system integrates discrete but aligned local stimuli to form percept of global contours. Previous experiments using "snake" contours showed that contour integration was mainly present in foveal vision but absent or greatly weakened in peripheral vision. In this study, we demonstrated that, for contour stimuli such as circles and ellipses, which bore good Gestalt properties, contour i...

To perceive a coherent environment, incomplete or overlapping visual forms must be integrated into meaningful coherent percepts, a process referred to as "Gestalt" formation or perceptual completion. Increasing evidence suggests that this process engages oscillatory neuronal activity in a distributed neuronal assembly. A separate line of evidence suggests that Gestalt formation requires top-dow...

Real-world objects are often endowed with features that violate Gestalt principles. In our experiment, we examined the neural correlates of binding under conflict conditions in terms of the binding-by-synchronization hypothesis. We presented an ambiguous stimulus ("diamond illusion") to 12 observers. The display consisted of four oblique gratings drifting within circular apertures. Its interpre...

While early and higher visual areas along the ventral visual pathway in the inferotemporal cortex are critical for the recognition of individual objects, the neural representation of human perception of complex global visual scenes remains under debate. Stroke patients with a selective deficit in the perception of a complex global Gestalt with intact recognition of individual objects - a defici...