Vision Research 126 (2016) 3–8

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Vision Research
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/visres

An overview of quantitative approaches in Gestalt perception

Frank Jäkel a,⇑, Manish Singh b, Felix A. Wichmann c,d, Michael H. Herzog e
a
Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germany
b
Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, United States
c
Neural Information Processing Group, Faculty of Science, and Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Tübingen, University of Tübingen, Germany
d
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Empirical Inference Department, Tübingen, Germany
e
Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Gestalt psychology is often criticized as lacking quantitative measurements and precise mathematical
Received 14 June 2016 models. While this is true of the early Gestalt school, today there are many quantitative approaches in
Received in revised form 22 June 2016 Gestalt perception and the special issue of Vision Research ‘‘Quantitative Approaches in Gestalt
Accepted 22 June 2016
Perception” showcases the current state-of-the-art. In this article we give an overview of these current
Available online 4 July 2016
approaches. For example, ideal observer models are one of the standard quantitative tools in vision
research and there is a clear trend to try and apply this tool to Gestalt perception and thereby integrate
Keywords:
Gestalt perception into mainstream vision research. More generally, Bayesian models, long popular in
Gestalt
Perception
other areas of vision research, are increasingly being employed to model perceptual grouping as well.
Ideal observer Thus, although experimental and theoretical approaches to Gestalt perception remain quite diverse,
Prägnanz we are hopeful that these quantitative trends will pave the way for a unified theory.
Grouping Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Perceptual organization
Bayesian models

1. Introduction
The year 2012 marked the 100 year anniversary of Max
Wertheimer’s habilitation treatise ‘‘Experimentelle Studien über
das Sehen von Bewegung” (Experimental Studies on Seeing
Motion, Wertheimer, 1912; Spillmann, 2012), the foundational
work of Gestalt psychology, and a milestone in vision research.
The centennial was commemorated by two comprehensive
reviews in Psychological Bulletin (Wagemans, Elder et al., 2012;
Wagemans, Feldman et al., 2012) and a symposium at the Euro-
pean Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP). Given the large
impact that Gestalt psychology has had on vision research, it is per-
haps a little surprising that there were not more celebrations.
Open any textbook on perception and in one of the earlier chap-
ters you will encounter the laws of good continuation, proximity,
common fate, similarity, and Prägnanz—Gestalt psychologists have
discovered and described many exciting phenomena and asked
many insightful questions that are still with us today. However,
while everyone seems to acknowledge the important role that
Gestalt psychologists played in the history of vision research, there
is, to put it mildly, ambivalence in the appreciation of their work.
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: fjaekel@uos.de (F. Jäkel).
In particular, the lack of quantitive laws was and is often criticized.
The Gestalt laws seem to be only qualitiative descriptions that do
not truly explain the phenomena, and the Gestaltists’ holistic the-
ories were often vague and perhaps, at least in retrospect, even
seem obscure. The purpose of the special issue in which this article
appears is to collect current thought and ongoing work on making
the phenomena of Gestalt perception quantitative and its concepts
more precise. It is a truism for many vision scientists that quanti-
tative measurement and theoretical development go hand in hand.
However, it is often hard to tell which of the two is the chicken and
which the egg. The special issue offers a combination of both.
2. What is a Gestalt?
Before we review the major themes that have emerged from
putting together the special issue, it is worthwhile to reflect on
the central concept of Gestalt psychology: the mysterious
‘‘Gestalt.” It is famously hard to translate the term into English—
but also the German native speakers among the authors of this
overview paper are not quite sure what exactly the term means
in German. Probably the best—but incomplete—translation is still
‘‘configuration.” This translation misses the holistic aspect that
was essential for the Gestalt psychologists’ early writings and that
survives in the famous dictum: ‘‘the whole is something else than
the sum of its parts” (Koffka, 1935, p.176).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2016.06.004
0042-6989/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
4 F. Jäkel et al. / Vision Research 126 (2016) 3–8
Fig. 1. Duncker’s wheel. One light is placed on the rim, and one the hub, and the
rolling wheel is observed in the dark. If only the light on the rim is switched on, a
cycloid path is perceived (upper panel). If both lights are switched on, the same
light is perceived as orbiting in a circular trajectory around the translating hub
(lower panel). Figure taken from Gershman et al. (2016).
One of the clearest demonstrations for what the Gestaltists
meant by this slogan is Duncker’s wheel (Duncker, 1929). Lights
are placed on the hub and the rim of a wheel (See Fig. 1). In a dark
room the rolling wheel is observed from the side. If the light at the
hub is the only light switched on, it will be the only thing visible in
the dark and it will appear to move on a straight line. If only the
light on the rim is switched on, its trajectory will look like that
of a strangely bouncing ball. Mathematically speaking, it follows
a cycloid curve. If we now switch on both lights, one might expect
to see a light moving along a straight line and the other one along a
bouncing trajectory. The actual perception is, however, radically
different. The dots form a Gestalt and the light on the rim seems
to orbit around the light on the hub, which still moves on a straight
line (namely, the percept of a rotating wheel). The percept that
results from the two light stimulations together is not simply
‘‘the sum” of the percepts of each light stimulation alone.1
On one hand this may seem surprising and it certainly was a
blow to analytic introspection and structuralist theories of the time
(see e.g. Hochberg, 1964). On the other hand, the perception of
relations obviously requires more than a single spot of light. Only
with two lights present does it make sense to speak of their dis-
tance, their relative positions, or relative motions. With only one
light present there are simply no relations and hence the percep-
tion of relations cannot possibly be explained by ‘‘summing” the
parts. One can therefore imagine that in addition to location and
motion detectors the brain has detectors for relations, or higher-
order features, and that is why the whole can be something other
than the sum of its parts. This view is very plausible given what we
know about the hierarchical organization of the brain. However, it
is important to understand precisely what the Gestalt psycholo-
gists’ insight was: For Duncker’s wheel subjects no longer perceive
the absolute motion of the parts once they form a Gestalt. The per-
ceived motion of the parts does not seem to be related to a low-
level motion detector that measures changes in retinal position
like the stimulation with the lights in isolation might have sug-
gested. Instead the organization of the whole stimulus array deter-
mines the perception of motion for the whole Gestalt—including all
the separate parts. The perception of the parts does not determine
the perception of the whole; it is the other way around. The Gestalt
takes precedence in perception and is not built in a bottom-up
fashion from clearly identifiable perceptual parts. This of course
does not mean that visual processing in the brain does not proceed
in a bottom-up fashion, based on the operation of mechanistic parts
such as motion detectors and higher-order feature detectors, or
1 2
Eye-movements certainly play a role here and complicate the story. For the sake
of argument assume fixation and (para-)foveal presentation.
that their interactions cannot explain why observers see the
Gestalt organization that they see—but one should not expect a
simple isomorphism between physical motion, motion detectors,
and motion perception.
One of the radical claims of the early Gestaltists therefore was
that the usual, analytic procedure of science—breaking down a
phenomenon into its constituent parts and building an under-
standing by piecing the parts together again—is seriously flawed
for analyzing perception. Of course there is a distinction between
perceptual phenomenology and mechanistic models, and later
generations of vision scientists and neurophysiologists have suc-
cessfully described many neural mechanisms for vision. Neverthe-
less, Herzog, Thunnell, and Öğmen (2016) in this issue remind us
that despite the insights of 100 years of Gestalt psychology we,
as vision scientists, often readily adopt an implicit isomorphism
between the world, neural circuits, and perception. And, although
we know how to build neural circuits from the bottom up, we sim-
ply do not know yet how the parts that we find in neural mecha-
nisms relate to Gestalt perception. It is easy to claim that Gestalt
perception results in an emergent manner from top-down and
recurrent network processes that are built from the known low-
level mechanisms—how else could it be?2 However, Herzog et al.
(2016) also remind us of one of the big recurring questions in per-
ception research: How much does our perception of the world corre-
spond to the external world? If the two corresponded very closely,
we could just ignore how things look to the observer and make pro-
gress simply by mapping higher and higher neural representations
to ever more complex physical stimuli—assuming that the neural
representations are somehow isomorphic to the structure of the
world. However, if perception does not correspond very closely to
the external world but is mostly constructed internally, then the
thorny subjective aspects of perception will not be eliminated easily.
Indeed, a basic claim of the Interface theory of perception (Hoffman,
Singh, & Prakash, 2015) is that what perception provides is a
species-specific user interface—one that evolved to guide fitness-
enhancing actions—but that need not bear any homomorphic resem-
blance to objective reality (see also Koenderink, 2014; Rogers, 2014).
Consider, again, Duncker’s wheel. While the interpretation of
one light orbiting around another light might seem veridical at
first—since this is really how the stimulus was produced—the per-
cept is often not really one of a rolling wheel but is better described
as a tumbling stick (Proffitt, Cutting, & Stier, 1979). Importantly,
with such an impoverished stimulus that only consists of two
lights, there are an infinite number of possible physical motions
that could have produced the stimulation—but only one (or a small
number) of stimulus organizations are actually perceived. The
Gestalt laws try to capture the regularities that exist between the
stimulus array and the resulting perceptual organization. They
are therefore intrinsically phenomenological. However, even if
vision is conceptualized as an inverse optics problem of recon-
structing what is ‘‘really out there”—thereby trying to sidestep
phenomenology—some additional principles are needed to explain
why certain organizations are preferred over others that are also
physically possible. The Gestalt psychologists’ answer is simple:
The organization that is perceived is the one that has the highest
degree of Prägnanz.
In fact, the law of Prägnanz has been suggested as the principal
law of perceptual organization (Hochberg, 1957). However, it was
clear to everyone that unless one can define and measure
Prägnanz, the concept is not really helpful for explaining percep-
tual organization. The resulting early attempts at quantification
have tried to formalize Prägnanz (in inverse form) as a minimum
Direct psychophysical evidence for this conjecture is, for example, reported by
Hock, Schöner, Brownlow, and Taler (2011).
 F. Jäkel et al. / Vision Research 126 (2016) 3–8
principle (Arnoult & Attneave, 1956; Hochberg, 1957; Hochberg &
McAlister, 1953). There is some measure that can be derived from
the stimulus and the visual system organizes the stimulus in a way
that minimizes this measure. The original Gestalt psychologists’
ideas about the underlying mechanisms for this minimization pro-
cess in terms of electrical fields seem obscure today, but are not
impossible to reconcile with modern parallel distributed process-
ing concepts (Epstein, 1988). One can, for example, imagine that
the stimulus activates a neural network that, over time, settles in
a state of minimum network energy (Palmer, 1990).
In any case, in analogy to the principle of minimum energy in
physics, it was hoped that one could find a similar principle for
perceptual organization. This approach has not been without suc-
cesses. For example, for Duncker’s wheel and related stimuli, it
has been found that the organization that minimizes relative
motions dominates perception (Cutting & Proffitt, 1982). But
unfortunately, while this particular measure works for a narrow
class of stimuli, it can hardly be called a general law of perception.
Such a general law, however, seemed to be within grasp once infor-
mation theory and coding theory were sufficiently well developed
to be applicable in psychology. Hence, it has been suggested that
Prägnanz can be formalized in terms of redundancy (Garner,
1974) or code length (Leeuwenberg, 1968; Restle, 1979; Buffart,
Leeuwenberg, & Restle, 1981; Leeuwenberg & van der Helm,
2013). In this way, Gestalt theory could also be integrated seam-
lessly into the new information-processing psychology of the time.
Modern developments have not, by and large, proceeded along
such information-theoretic lines.3 It is worth noting, however, that
the currently popular Bayesian inferential approaches to perception
may naturally be viewed as an alternate form of the same basic idea
of redundancy in coding. Not only are the concepts of information
and probability closely related but, mathematically speaking, they
are really two sides of the same coin. To be more precise, it has been
shown that maximizing simplicity (an important aspect of Prägnanz,
and generally expressed in information-theoretic terms) and maxi-
mizing the Bayesian posterior, under certain simplifying assump-
tions, really amount to the same thing (Chater, 1996; Feldman,
2009). Thus the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) strategy in a Bayesian
model—pick the perceptual interpretation with the highest posterior
probability—is naturally viewed as another form of the minimum
principle. A recent Bayesian framework for perceptual grouping,
for example, is able to quantify the plausibility of different grouping
interpretations in a wide range of grouping problems—including dot
clustering, contour integration, and part decomposition—and thus
raises the hope that the elusive notion of Prägnanz may be amen-
able, after all, to precise quantification and measurement (Froyen,
Feldman, & Singh, 2015).
3. Measuring Gestalt phenomena
In the context of modern cognitive neuroscience, the idea of for-
mulating ‘‘laws” that relate physical stimuli to subjective percepts
may seem a bit quaint. A satisfying explanation today seems to
require a mechanistic model, ideally in neural terms, and not
merely the description of a law-like relationship. However, unless
one has carefully described the quantitative relationship between
stimulus, percept, and response, how would one evaluate the suc-
cess of a mechanistic model? It is thus still important to measure
Gestalt phenomena and their effects on observable behavior pre-
cisely and thereby make the Gestalt laws quantitative, even if the
long-term goal is a mechanistic model for these phenomena. Not
surprisingly therefore, many papers in the special issue are con-
cerned with such measurement problems.
3
We note that the work of Wilder, Feldman, and Singh (2016) in the special issue is
motivated by an information-theoretic approach to good continuation, however.
5
Hawkins, Houpt, Eidels, and Townsend (2016) directly tackle
the core problem: To what extent is the whole different from the
sum of the parts? Reaction times have long been used to put con-
straints on information-processing models in cognitive psychology
and the corresponding methodology is extremely well developed.
Hawkins et al. (2016) thus can quantify how different the process-
ing time of a Gestalt is compared to a parallel race model, where
the parts are processed in isolation. A strength of their paper is that
it nicely illustrates the methodology in what is probably the sim-
plest situation possible: Two dots alone and together.
Another central problem of Gestalt theory is this: Usually there
is not only one Gestalt law at work but several laws operate simul-
taneously, and interact in potentially complex ways. Without
quantifying the strength of each law and its effect on, say, group-
ing, it is impossible to predict what will happen in multi-law situ-
ations. Thus, Kimchi, Yeshurun, Spehar, and Pirkner (2016) study
the quantitative effects of different contexts on attentional capture,
and Overvliet and Sayim (2016) measure the influence of different
contexts on haptic discrimination. These studies follow the tradi-
tional path of measuring the effects that grouping has on perfor-
mance measures, such as reaction time and discrimination
ability, and thereby indirectly measure subjective grouping
strength. But can we get at the theoretical concept of grouping
strength differently, perhaps more directly?
Hock and Schöner (2016) use the beautiful effect of dynamic
grouping motion for studying the grouping affinity of different sur-
faces in different contexts quantitatively. They argue that the
effects that they see are suggestive of a non-linear dynamical sys-
tem and they sketch a model to account for them. In general, char-
acterizing the temporal dynamics of Gestalt phenomena seems like
a good way to get a more direct quantitative handle on the under-
lying perceptual and neural processes, and this is what Spehar and
Halim (2016) using psychophysics and Sanguinetti, Trujillo,
Schnyer, Allen, and Peterson (2016) using EEG are after. While no
paper in this special issue fulfills this promise yet, in the future
we hope to see mechanistic models of the dynamics of perceptual
organization with meaningful parameters that can be fit to behav-
ioral and physiological data simultaneously. In the context of such
models, measuring Gestalt phenomena would mean measuring the
values of these parameters, rather than measuring the effects
Gestalt organization has on performance measures.
4. Ideal observers
Although theoretical papers in the special issue do not, for the
most part, propose mechanistic or neural models (but see
Keemink & van Rossum, 2016; Matin, Matin, & Li, 2016), several
papers (6 out of 27) propose ideal observer models. Given the suc-
cess of ideal observer models in vision science more generally this
is perhaps not very surprising (Geisler, 1989; Green & Swets, 1988;
Kersten, Mamassian, & Yuille, 2004). Ideal observer models are
often useful for quantifying how much of the information that
would in principle be available in a task is used by the subjects.
Tweaking the assumptions about which information is used and
comparing the resulting predictions to actual performance can be
suggestive of mechanisms (Zednik & Jäkel, 2014). If the experimen-
tal task can be formulated as a detection, a discrimination, or a
classification task this is standard procedure in vision science
and is also done fruitfully here (Erlikhman & Kellman, 2016;
Machilsen, Wagemans, & Demeyer, 2016).
However, in the case of Gestalt perception there is reason to
doubt that the standard procedure is always appropriate. The
details of the ideal observer models vary—some use orthodox
statistics (Blusseau, Corbini, Maiche, Morel, & von Gioi, 2016;
Lezama, Randall, Morel, & von Gioi, 2016) and others are firmly
6 F. Jäkel et al. / Vision Research 126 (2016) 3–8
rooted in Bayesian inference (Gershman, Tenenbaum, & Jäkel,
2016; Wilder et al., 2016)—but they have in common that they
treat Gestalt organization as a statistical inference problem. To
the degree that a statistical inference problem can be expressed
as an optimization problem (finding the simplest, the least acci-
dental, the most likely, the most probable, or the most redundant
organization) they follow in the footsteps of earlier Gestalt theoriz-
ing (see above). But how do modelers decide what is optimized?
Take the example of good continuation. We know what we want
to get out of the optimization process, namely something that
looks like the law of good continuation. So somehow the function
that is being optimized needs to penalize an organization into non-
smooth and rapidly varying curves. In a sense, we have to put in
the Gestalt law that we want to get out.4 If this results in a compact
quantitative model of Gestalt organization, perhaps one could over-
look the fact that we have engineered the optimization process to do
exactly that. However, does it matter then that the optimization
function is expressed in terms of false-alarm rate, likelihood, or pos-
terior probability? Could we not achieve the same by optimizing a
suitable measure of complexity or an appropriately defined energy
functional (as in Keemink & van Rossum, 2016)?
A popular reason to favor a Bayesian approach in vision is that it
allows researchers to express the fundamental problem of percep-
tion as inferring the ‘‘true” state of the world from unreliable sense
data—in essence this is the old idea of vision as inverse optics. If
this Bayesian formulation brings unity to many different phenom-
ena in vision, this will be a good reason to formulate Gestalt per-
ception also in these terms. In fact, in the case of good
continuation one can justify the assumptions that are built into
the priors by looking at the statistics of edges and contours in
‘‘the real world” (Brunswik & Kamiya, 2001; Geisler, Perry, Super,
& Gallogly, 2001; Elder & Goldberg, 2002). Unfortunately, in many
cases it is not obvious what the ‘‘real world” is for a perceptual sys-
tem. In what sense are edges and contours ‘‘real”? Do we only pos-
tulate them because we perceive them or because it is sometimes
suggested that this is what V1 may represent? Thus, whilst the
Bayesian approach is typically presented as a formalization of the
inverse optics approach, it need not be: the choice of priors and
putative computations can equally be viewed as a way of imposing
internal structure on the perception of the world.
This issue becomes acute in the model of Gershman et al.
(2016): They assume that motion is always decomposed into a
hierarchical motion tree and that the task of the system is to infer
the structure of the tree. However, this hierarchical structure may
or may not be the structure that generated the physical motions.
Gershman et al. (2016) do not collect any real-world statistics to
justify their prior, instead they take the prior to model the struc-
ture that the observer imposes on the world. Hence, what the
model ‘‘perceives” is not what is ‘‘really out there”, but the struc-
ture it assumes about the world. The constraints that are imposed
by this structure may (as in Kwon, Li, Sawada, & Pizlo, 2016) or
may not correspond to the ‘‘real world”. But even if they do not,
they may correspond to a human observer’s subjective perception,
and in these cases an ideal observer with unrealistic assumptions
about the world might still be useful—as a model of human
perception.
In fact, part of the appeal of the Bayesian approach is that it
makes the hypothesized prior assumptions and internal represen-
tations of the observer explicit, and separates them from other fac-
4
This statement admittedly involves a bit of oversimplification. An important
benefit of articulating a problem in formal terms is that it forces one to ask, and
empirically address, mathematically precise questions such as: What geometric
property exactly does the visual system assume is being continued in ‘‘good continu
ation”—tangent direction, curvature, rate of change of curvature (see e.g. Singh &
Fulvio, 2007)?
tors such as sensory limitations or perceptual inference
mechanisms. Hence, pragmatically it seems like a good research
strategy to try and formalize the Gestalt laws as Bayesian priors
and likelihood functions, and thereby integrate Gestalt ideas with
one of the most popular current theoretical frameworks in vision
science. However, the special issue also shows that this is not the
only game in town and other statistical approaches exist for ideal
observer modeling (Blusseau et al., 2016; Lezama et al., 2016).
Ultimately, as mentioned before, most vision researchers will
agree that a mechanistic model that can be related to the underly-
ing neuroscience will be more satisfying than any of the available
ideal observer models. In this sense, perhaps, the ideal observer
models are only an intermediate step towards more mechanistic
models (Zednik & Jäkel, 2014). Hence, arguing about which ideal
observer model is the right one may be futile until more concrete
mechanistic proposals for Gestalt perception are on the table.
5. Prominent topics
The law of good continuation is the Gestalt law that seems most
amenable to a theoretical integration of ecological, psychological,
and neuroscientific work. In fact, with association fields there are
already mechanistic proposals on the table that link well with
what is known about the statistics of natural images and psycho-
logical and neurophysiological data. Not surprisingly then, out of
the 27 papers in the special issue 7 deal with contours and how
line elements are grouped; more than for any other topic
(Blusseau et al., 2016; Keemink & van Rossum, 2016; Kwon,
Agrawal, Li, & Pizlo, 2016; Lezama et al., 2016; Machilsen et al.,
2016; Schmidt & Vancleef, 2016; Wilder et al., 2016). While there
is a certain family resemblance among these studies, given the long
history and importance of the law of good continuation for Gestalt
perception it is remarkable—and perhaps a little disappointing—
how diverse the theoretical and experimental approaches are. Con-
tour grouping is certainly the success story among all quantitative
approaches in Gestalt perception—but different researchers tell the
story quite differently.
Apart from contours, other prominent topics in this special
issue are motion organization (Clarke, Öğmen, & Herzog, 2016;
Gershman et al., 2016), figure-ground separation and boundary
formation (Dimicolli, 2016; Erlikhman & Kellman, 2016;
Sanguinetti et al., 2016; Spehar & Halim, 2016), or perceptual
grouping (Hock & Schöner, 2016; Kimchi et al., 2016; Murgia
et al., 2016; Overvliet & Sayim, 2016). There are two classic topics
that are underrepresented: bistability (Ouhnana & Kingdom, 2016)
and occlusion (Hazenberg & van Lier, 2016) are only represented
by a single paper each. Similar to the contour papers there is little
theoretical coherence among these groups of papers. While many
of them deal with closely related issues their theoretical framing
is often strikingly different. Across topics there seems to be even
less theoretical coherence (except for the relatively common use
of ideal observers that was already discussed above). All the papers
try to be quantitative about Gestalt perception, but the field is cer-
tainly still far away from a common theoretical framework. There
are pockets of coherence though: Shape perception has emerged as
a relatively coherent topic in the special issue. Although they use
very different stimuli and experimental protocols, the three papers
on shape use the common language of shape transformations
(Denisova, Feldman, Su, & Singh, 2016; Schmidt, Spröte, &
Fleming, 2016; Spröte & Fleming, 2016).
Despite the current lack of a unified, coherent framework for
Gestalt perception, there is a noticeable interest to apply Gestalt
ideas to other areas of psychology. One example in the special issue
is the paper by van der Helm (2016) that is concerned with local
and global visual processing in autism. Another example is the
 F. Jäkel et al. / Vision Research 126 (2016) 3–8
paper by Im, Zhong, and Halberda (2016) on the perception of
numerosity. The approximate number system has long been stud-
ied by developmental psychologists using random dot arrays. Im
et al. (2016) present an algorithm for grouping such random dot
displays based on proximity and demonstrate that the ‘‘clusteri-
ness” of the display leads to an underestimation of the number
of dots. It was always the ambition of Gestalt psychologists to have
an impact on psychology beyond perception, and this seems to be
still true today.
6. Conclusion
Overall, the papers collected in the special issue show that
research on Gestalt perception is still concerned with many of
the classic topics. A common criticism of work in the Gestalt tradi-
tion is that it is not quantitative. The papers collected in the special
issue demonstrate that this criticism is not always justified. How-
ever, these papers are also highly diverse and heterogeneous. Even
though they study the same phenomena as earlier Gestaltists,
there is little theoretical coherence. What happened to the Gestalt
school that always aspired to provide a unified vision of psychol-
ogy? Perhaps there is, in fact, little that holds the classic phenom-
ena of Gestalt psychology together. Or perhaps the field just has
not been able yet to formally articulate what exactly a unified
Gestalt theory amounts to.
Be this as it may, Wertheimer’s habilitation treatise on motion
perception from 1912 was the founding work of Gestalt psychol-
ogy. His later ‘‘Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt”
(Wertheimer, 1922; Wertheimer, 1923; Spillmann, 2012), how-
ever, tried to formulate a more coherent Gestalt theory. If, within
the next years, we are able to formalize and quantify the ideas of
these two latter papers, these publications might prove to be much
more important than the paper from 1912 and might provide a
cause for bigger celebrations in 2022 or 2023.
Acknowledgement
MS was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant
EY021494. MHH was supported by the Swiss National Science
Foundation (SNF) Project "Basics of visual processing: From retino-
topic encoding to non-retinotopic representations". FAW was
funded, in part, by the German Federal Ministry of Education and
Research (BMBF) through the Bernstein Computational Neuro-
science Program Tübingen (FKZ: 01GQ1002).
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