A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: I. Perceptual Grouping and Figure–Ground Organization

Since Max Wertheimer’s 1912 paper on phi motion, Gestalt psychology has evolved from a school of thought focused on phenomenal experience into a rigorous component of modern vision science. While early critics dismissed Gestalt ideas as vague or purely descriptive, contemporary research has successfully addressed these limitations by integrating Gestalt principles into computational frameworks and neurophysiological studies. This review synthesizes a century of progress, focusing on how the visual system organizes discrete elements into coherent structures.

Grouping is the process by which the visual system identifies elements that belong together. Classic principles—such as proximity, similarity, common fate, and good continuation—have been refined into quantitative laws. For instance, the pure distance law demonstrates that grouping by proximity depends on relative distance rather than global configuration. Modern research has also identified new principles like synchrony, common region, and element connectedness. These grouping processes are not merely static; they operate at multiple levels of the visual hierarchy, with feedback loops that allow the system to reconcile local inputs with the perceived 3D structure of the environment.

Figure-ground organization determines which region of a visual scene is perceived as the foreground (the figure) and which as the background. While classic principles like convexity, symmetry, and surroundedness were long known, recent work has identified additional cues, including lower region bias, top-bottom polarity, and motion-based cues like advancing regions. A significant shift in the field has been the move toward understanding how these principles interact with past experience. While early Gestaltists emphasized innate, autonomous organization, modern evidence suggests that familiar configurations can influence initial figure-ground assignment, challenging the strict dichotomy between bottom-up and top-down processing.