The theory of form named after a German school (Berlin School) in the '20s that changed the development of psychology.
Setting this school, in fact, opposed to the dominant between the late 800 and early 900 called "associational" because believed that the perception of an object was the result of the combination of different sensory elements.
The birth of Gestalt psychology (usually translated as "form", "structure"). goes back exactly to 1912, when Max Wertheimer wrote an article that identified a single perceptual process by which individual stimuli would be integrated into the subject, in a form with continuity.
This meant that what had previously been considered a passive process - perceiving - came to be thought of as something far more active as an asset subject to certain general principles of organization.
The perception thus depends on the elements but not the structure of these elements in an "organized body" in a "Gestalt " The manner in which they are the forms have been classified and described as "laws of form" and have listed by Wertheimer in 1923 as follows:
Law of proximity:
elements of the perceptual field are merged into forms with a lot more cohesion, the lower is the distance between them.
Faced with a set of figures, although different, they do not see forms but feel isolated groups of different elements.
Law of equality or similarity :
in a picture with many elements, these are merged into forms with all the greater cohesion, the greater is their similarity.
The perceptual system groups elements based on a multiple parameters such as shape, color, size, proportion, pattern, direction etc..
Law of common fate:
the elements that have a movement of solidarity with one another, and different from that of the other elements are merged into shapes.
In a configuration tends to unify the lines with the same direction or orientation, or movement, according to the course more consistent in defense of the simplest forms and more balanced.
Law of closed form:
lines which form closed figures tend to be viewed as a formal unit.
The perceptual system is designed to provide additional information to close a figure, so we tend to close an open figure that seems incomplete or aborted.
Law of continuity of the form or direction:
a number of elements placed one after the other, are united in their forms according to the continuity of leadership. Figure
perceive as a unit and not AB and XY and AY XB, or AX and YB.
Law of pregnancy:
the form that is so much "good" as the given conditions permit.
In practice what fundamentally determines the appearance of form is the characteristic of "significance" or "good form" on which they possessed: the more regular, symmetrical, cohesive, consistent, balanced, simple, concise they are, the greater the likely have to impose itself on our perception.
Law of past experience:
elements for our past experience are usually associated with each other tend to be combined into shapes.
An observer who does not know our alphabet can not see the letter E in the three broken lines.
Law of Symmetry:
elements arranged symmetrically with respect to an axis or a point will be read by our perceptual system as a unit
