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There has always been a close association between psychology and the philosophy of science. Although some individuals over the past 200 years have suggested that psychology had little to offer philosophy (Kant and Popper), many more have expressed a contrary opinion. The chapter shows that psychology influenced philosophy of science mainly through four areas: perception in the form of psychophysics (on Mach, Peirce, and James) and in the form of Gestalt psychology (on Carnap, Hanson, and Kuhn), animal behavior in the form of behaviorism (on Russell, Bergmann, and the logical positivists), and cognitive psychology (on Popper, Giere, and Thagard). On the basis of the present findings, the conclusion is reached that better understanding of science is considerably dependent on knowing how the mind works, which is an idea as old as the British empiricists and the Würzburg school and as young as contemporary cognitive science.

This chapter explores the evolution of academic psychology in the first four decades of the twentieth century. In the United States, a style of psychological study that emphasized the ability of individuals to solve problems in a real context gained adherents who called this functionalism. Another movement, behaviorism, arose partly in response to functionalism, and partly as a reflection of the trend to see science as limited to phenomena that can be measured by any observer and that is also limited, as positivists had proposed, to visible things. At the same time, Gestalt psychology was winning minds among German psychologists, and as Nazism gained ground in Europe, leading Gestalt psychologists were coming to the United States, where they challenged the behaviorism they saw around them in the work of their new American colleagues.

This chapter situates Mário Pedrosa’s early theses on Gestalt in relation to his reception of psychiatric patients’ work, in particular Dr. Nise da Silveira’s patients in Rio de Janeiro. As the leading art critic, Pedrosa’s writing on formal autonomy and aesthetic response was foundational to the understanding of geometric abstraction in the 1950s. The author argues that Pedrosa’s theoretical grappling with patients’ work prompted his turn to Heinz Werner’s theorization of physiognomic expression and perception. In doing so, Pedrosa articulates an understanding of abstract geometry as expressive rather than rational or purely visual. Accordingly, this chapter’s discussion of physiognomic Gestalt displaces the well-established alignment of geometric abstraction, modern rationality, and Brazil’s expanding industrialization in the 1950s. The chapter also demonstrates how patients’ creative expression was not uniformly aligned with a surrealist or art informel aesthetic, as continued to be the case in Western Europe.

This chapter argues that cortical networks and the knowledge they represent are hierarchically organized in layers by order of complexity or generality of cognitive content. These layers correspond to cortical stages for the processing and representation of sensory information. Further, the perceptual networks are amply interconnected within and between layers, as well as with the motor networks or cognits of frontal regions. The chapter assembles evidence of an order in the cortical processing of sensory information that corresponds isomorphically to the mental or phenomenal order of perception. The first two sections of the chapter deal with psychological aspects of perception; the last three deal with the mechanisms by which networks of posterior and frontal cortex process sensory information in perception. The limited capacity of sensory systems to process sensory information is the primary reason why selective attention serves the categorizing in one particular sector of perception at the expense of all others. There are two major components of selective attention: inclusion and exclusion. This chapter also discusses gestalt psychology, perceptual binding, and perception-action cycle.

In 1973, Gunnar Johansson launched the systematic study of the perception of the human body in motion. Merging his applied interests in traffic safety and his theoretical interests in vector analysis and decomposition, Johansson produced captivating displays of people dancing and doing other ordinary activities, but with the people represented only by lights on their joints. This chapter discusses Johansson’s research and some of my own follow-up on his ideas, serving as background for ideas in this volume.

This chapter questions the underlying assumptions of both classic Artificial Intelligence, founded in the analogy between the brain and the digital computer, and the newer tradition that construes the mind as an emergent property of interacting, distributed, parallel processes. It specifically explores Gestalt psychology and its brief engagement with cybernetics to suggest that was perhaps a missed opportunitt, and additionally examines John von Neumann's influential automata theory. The structure of insight helped explain the complex, nonmechanical behavior of living, acting organisms. For von Neumann, the creative plasticity of the nervous system served only to highlight the rather simplistic, and inferior, mechanical structure of the early computers, something he was of course well positioned to notice. His terse conclusion was that the logical structures involved in nervous system activity must “differ considerably” from the ones that are familiar in logic and mathematics.

Sound and image are perceived as an utter unity, disavowing the effect’s basis in artifice. This situation has dissuaded much in the way of serious questioning of film as more than simply a visual medium. This chapter provides some technological and historical information but also concentrates on outlining aesthetic procedures and addressing the psychology (and neuropsychology) of synchronizing sound and image. It argues that a Gestalt-inspired approach provides more insight into the unity of sound and image into an illusory whole, and as such is more useful than the cognitive psychology-inspired framework that dominates the study of film. So, rather than deal with the process through a notion of atomized packages of information processed by a separated ‘Descartian’ mind, the book adopts an interest in physical perception as the central reality of interface between the film as audiovisual object and the audience.

This chapter is concerned with developments in psychology in the 1950s. It suggests that this period witnessed the demise of Gestalt psychology, a distinctive approach to experimental psychology, strongly influenced by the Gestalt principles of perception. During this period, in universities the influence of behaviourism was very strong and the major focus of most psychology courses were theories of learning. Another significant development came through the information processing approach to the study of human cognition, which reflected a number of separate but related sources. These include communication theory and the attempt by Claude Shannon to measure the flow of information through an electronic communication channel in terms of the capacity of a message to reduce uncertainty.

The cognitive abilities of species outside of mammalian classes may prove useful and insightful to the study of animal intelligence. In Europe, particularly within the tradition of Gestalt psychology or in the work of zoologists somewhat influenced by the Gestalt tradition, studies of the intelligence of birds and fish (and even nonvertebrate species such as insects) have been quite common. After World War II, the Gestalt research tradition largely disappeared and the remaining followers of Gestalt psychology (concentrated in a few universities in Germany, the northeast of Italy, and Japan) concerned themselves mainly with studies of human visual perception. In this chapter, the author describes some of the work that he has carried out with his collaborators in the past 15 years on cognition in nonmammalian species (mainly the domestic chicken) and addresses issues that were largely inspired by the European Gestalt tradition, rather than by the psychology of animal learning, which has provided the typical background of most contemporary comparative psychology.

Over the course of the 1930s and 40s, consumers came to be seen as a diverse and socially contextualized group, which was not as easily swayed by mass media messages. Consumer behavior and attitudes were increasingly understood as complex phenomena, which required analysis drawing on a variety of approaches from individual, and social psychology to the probing of cognitive and perception processes. This was part of a larger story of transatlantic exchanges in the social sciences. Paul Lazarsfeld and his Vienna School elaborated conceptions of consumer motivations and offered new survey methodologies. Other émigré social scientists such as Berlin-trained psychologists Kurt Lewin and George Katona were instrumental in transforming ideas about the social psychology of consumption and about the formation and impact of consumer attitudes. Leading protagonists of Gestalt psychology also fled to the United States during the 1930s where their work informed a growing interest in cognitive processes among marketing psychologists. Transatlantic knowledge transfers thus fundamentally altered midcentury consumer psychology.

This chapter summarizes research showing that object memories can exert an influence on figure assignment. It supposes that these object-memory effects arise from matches between partial configurations in object memory and portions of borders rather than whole continuous borders (or whole regions). The proposed partial configurations code boundary features and their spatial relationships; hence they code configural information conjunctively. It supposes that known objects are represented by a number of overlapping partial configurations within posterior regions of the ventral pathway. It also presents evidence suggesting that different portions of the continuous border of a region of uniform texture, color, and luminance can be matched to different object memories before figure assignment is completed.

This chapter offers a brief outline of Gurwitsch’s career in the first half of his life, in Germany until 1932 and in France between 1932 and 1938. It then considers in detail the texts, published and unpublished at the time, which he produced in this period. It provides detailed analysis of his doctoral and Habilitation theses and of the texts which he produced in the period when he was mentor to Merleau-Ponty. It concludes with a summary of the correlations between these social and intellectual trajectories.

This chapter examines the use of walk cycles in animation practice. Walk cycles—frames of characters’ actions that can be repeated in loops—have been important in animation not only for portraying coordinations of moving parts to convey lifelike movement but also for saving labor. However, if a cycle is noticed by the viewer, the figure’s movement will appear imposed and not self-directed, leaving the figure lifeless. Through a study of Norman McLaren and Grant Munro’s film Canon (1964), this chapter further argues that cycles can be layered to create a living, open system of cyclical parts.

This chapter examines the use of perspectival movement (or camera movement) in animation practice. In particular, it argues that the ambiguity of the out-of-field space that perspectival movement creates entails a suppression of another kind of ambiguity: the graphic ambiguity of marks on a surface. Thus, much of the history of animated space can be seen as a history of trade-offs between the possibilities of camera movement and those of graphic metamorphoses. However, two films—Norman McLaren’s Blinkity Blank (1955) and Caroline Leaf’s The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977)—manage to combine these possibilities, creating spaces that seem to transform themselves as the camera moves through them.

Mexico’s successful bid to host 1968 Olympics necessitated the management of the country’s holistic and cohesive modern image for the worldwide audiences. Chapter 3 analyses the integration and mobilization of various design disciplines—especially built environment and visual communications—to produce and convey such an image. Focusing on the immersive participatory street environments designed for the Games, the chapter examines work of planner-architect Eduardo Terrazas, head of the urban design for the Mexican Olympic organizing committee—and compares them to the ideas promoted by the neo-avant-garde kinetic artists. It thus shows the seemingly neutral notions such as interdisciplinary collaboration, Gestalt psychology, and cybernetic responsiveness engender also frameworks of hierarchy, management, and the cult of expertise. The analysis demonstrates kinetic environments and technologies to be inherently open-ended and unstable, clearing space for the interventions of 68 Movement.

To show how much people vary in their relationships with verbal language, this chapter portrays the mental worlds of translator Michael Holquist, complex systems scholar David Krakauer, geoscientist Lynn Margulis, and life scientist Jeff Martin. Holquist and Martin experience language as a medium that makes thinking possible, and they don’t believe that their ideas have fully emerged until they can be expressed in words. Krakauer and Margulis, in contrast, find that verbal language hinders profound, innovative thought. Interwoven with these four individuals’ insights is a brief history of 20th-century research on the relationship between verbal language and thought. The four participants’ insights engage the findings of Würzburg School psychologists, behaviorists, Gestalt psychologists, L. S. Vygotsky, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Noam Chomsky. Close analysis of these scientists and philosophers’ work reveals how often scholars’ personal experiences with verbal language and visual mental imagery have shaped their theories of thought.

This chapter has seven subdivisions. Section A delineates the major theories that have been formulated about how living organisms process pattern and shape information. Section B describes neurophysiological research that has been carried out studying the temporal lobe, an area which plays a major role in pattern and shape perception. Section C considers how we process subjective contours. Section D examines how selective cortical lesions affect pattern and shape perception. Section E deals with transposition, invariance, and figure/ground effects in visual perception. Section F examines the nature of short-term temporal interactions in pattern perception that includes visual masking and metacontrast. Section G provides a summary for the chapter.