What is the GESTALT PROXIMITY LAW?

In psychology, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Gestalt current set out to understand how individuals perceive the order of the surrounding world. What this school has managed to formulate are the principles of visual perception, recognized even today, and that define how human beings interact with visual stimuli by creating orders from they. With this Psychology-Online article we will analyze one of these principles with some examples, to understand what is the Gestalt law of proximity.

Index

1. Gestalt Laws
2. What is the Gestalt Proximity Law
3. Difference between law of proximity and law of similarity

The Gestalt psychology tries to understand psychological phenomena showing them as organized and structured wholes, rather as the sum of their constituent parts, dissociating thus structuralism (with its tendency to analyze mental processes in elementary sensations) and accentuates concepts such as emergent properties, olism and context.

In Berlin in the first half of the 20th century, Max Wertheimer and other psychologists (including Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka) continued their studies on human visual perception, giving life to the famous Gestalt Theory. Its objective was to investigate the global and holistic processes involved in the perception of a standard way in the environment; in particular, they have tried to explain how human beings perceive groups of objects as elements of whole and how he perceives instead parts of objects, simple and coherent forms endowed with a meaning precise. Furthermore, they argued that it is impossible to understand perceptual experience by composing it into a set of simpler physical units: everything is different from the sum of its parts.

Gestalt offers us a series of laws that clarify how people categorize the items they see and how they develop their ideas about the events that happen around them. These laws of perception are autonomous from experience and present from birth; they are therefore called autochthonous factors. With special reference to visual perceptions, main rules or Gestalt laws of organization of the perceived data are:

• Proximity: the elements are joined in ways with greater cohesion the greater their closeness. This is the Gestalt law that we will talk about in this article.
• Likeness: the elements are joined with greater cohesion the greater their similarity (by color, shape, dimension, etc.).
• Common destiny: elements with movement equal to each other and different from other elements are grouped.
• Steering continuity: by superimposing two elements, their lines are joined according to continuity of direction.
• Closing: some unrelated elements can be interpreted as a single figure.
• Pregnancy: the simpler and more stable an element is, the more it appears "of impact".
• Past experience: the brain tends to create already seen forms where there are only separated or interrupted simple lines.
• Figure background: it is the classic scheme on which optical illusions are based, when a figure is immediately understood as such thanks to its contours, but then we realize that the background can also be figure.

The Gestalt law of proximity says that when there are objects physically close to each other, we tend to think that they belong to a group. All other conditions being equal, therefore, the variable that guarantees the appearance of a unitary figure is represented by the relative distance of the elements that compose it, or the area delimited by the closest margins between Yes. The proximity in space of two or more elements induces with good probability to consider them as a single figure.

Let's look at some everyday examples of the Gestalt law of proximity. We all use the principle of proximity, and this happens every day unconsciously. An example? You are reading it right now! This article uses the principle of proximity in the subdivision in paragraphs of the text: as long as the lines of text are close to each other, we perceive them as a single elementEither a paragraph or a column of text; the moment we, on the contrary, insert too much space between lines, the lines will start to look different to each other and not as part of the same text. Each paragraph, being a different topic from the previous and the next, is divided among the others, but is perceived as a unit because the individual words and letters are close.

The principle of proximity is also very useful to make the usability of products more intuitive in the field of design. This is another example of the Gestalt law of proximity.

The law of similarity say what objects similar to each other by color, shape, size or orientation, are perceived as relative to each other or belonging to the same group. They tend to unify with each other elements that have some kind of similarity by observing their vision from a distance in terms of color and objects, movement and positioning (or orientation).

This principle is also important in the world of design; in fact, it allows us to recognize elements that belong to the same product family even when vary in form and functions of the same, provided that there are formal characteristics that make them Similar. All patterns and textures, for example, are based on this principle, but not only, even when building a series of icons. The icons must be similar to each other to function within a visually coherent set; Although each icon has a different shape, it has similar characteristics to the others: it has the same color, has the same thickness of the lines and the same graphic style, which makes us perceive them as a everything.

The same principle applies to branding, to the design of a coordinated image: when the coordinated image of a brand is going to be built, in effect, it is going to be used certain elements repeating them in each application of that logo or coordinated material of the company, creating rhythm and consistency.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to What is the Gestalt Proximity Law, we recommend that you enter our category of Cognitive psychology.

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