A Failure of the Proximity Principle in the Perception of Motion (original) (raw)

Gestalttheorie. Instead, attention is one major topic in cognitive psychology; in some sense, one may say that the cognitive revolution began just by putting this concept in the centre of the interest of experimental psychologists. But is it true that attention is missing in Gestalt theorising? Van Leeuwen and colleagues persuasively argue that this concept can be appropriately reconceptualised in the terms of figure-ground articulation, a matter, on which Gestalt psychology gave the most valuable contributions. Sergei Gepshtein, Ivan Tyukin, and Michael Kubovy focus their attention on one principle of perceptual organisation, the proximity principle. They convincingly demonstrate that this principle, invoked by many authors as a possible candidate for a single unifying factor, does not generalise to dynamic scenes, for no spatiotemporal proximity principle governs the perception of motion. Instead, two characteristics of the visual systems, that is, the intrinsic limitations of visual measurements and the constraints on the number of measurements that the visual systems can perform concurrently, can explain the perceptual results where the proximity principle fails. In the last paper, Raymond Pavlovski shows how Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) can reproduce typical Gestalt properties of the visual system. In this case we have an inversion of perspective: Pavlovski does not try to investigate the compliance of Gestalt principles to experimental results, but starting from the simulation he argues that the mathematical category modelling RNN describes both perceptual gestalt and large-scale neural network states. We are aware that the contributions herein gathered offer only a limited glimpse on what Gestalt psychology is able to say to contemporary psychology. Nevertheless, we hope that they sufficiently demonstrate that Gestalt psychology is not just a chapter of a textbook about the history of psychology.

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