Without knowledge of letter shapes, you would perceive the text as meaningless shapes, just as people who do not know Chinese or Japanese see the characters of those languages as meaningless shapes. Reading, then, is a form of visual perception. Note that in the example above, you did not stop to read every single letter carefully. Instead, you probably perceived whole words and phrases. You may have also used context to help you figure out what some of the words must be. For example, recognizing upside may have helped you predict down, because the two words often occur together. For these reasons, you probably overlooked problems with the individual letters "some of them, such as the n in down, are mirror images of normal letters. You would have noticed these errors immediately if the letters were right side up, because you have much more experience seeing letters in that orientation. How people perceive a well-organized pattern or whole, instead of many separate parts, is a topic of interest in Gestalt psychology. According to Gestalt psychologists, the whole is different than the sum of its parts. Gestalt is a German word-meaning configuration or pattern.GESTALT LAWS OF GROUPING The three founders of Gestalt psychology were German researchers Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang KÖhler. These men identified a number of principles by which people organize isolated parts of a visual stimulus into groups or whole objects. There are five main laws of grouping: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and common fate. A sixth law, that of simplicity, encompasses all of these laws. Although most often applied to visual perception, the Gestalt laws also apply to perception in other senses. When we listen to music, for example, we do not hear a series of disconnected or random tones. We interpret the music as a whole, relating the sounds to each other based on how similar they are in pitch, how close together they are in time, and other factors.
