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The Main Influences On Gestalt Psychology

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d reflection on the main influences on Gestalt psychology and how they contributed to its development.

Since being discovered, gestalt psychology created vital contributions to the psychology of thinking and problem solving influenced by thinkers, including, Immanuel Kant, Ernst Mach and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This paper will reflect on the main influences on Gestalt psychology, their contributions, and the principles of perceptual organization. According to the Merriam-Webster, the definition of gestalt psychology is: the study of perception and behavior from the standpoint of an individual 's response to configurational wholes with stress on the uniformity of psychological and physiological events and rejection of analysis into discrete events of stimulus, percept, and response

One of the main influences on Gestalt psychology

, and their ideas influenced the later development of cognitive psychology.

The gestaltists argued that understanding mind and behavior could not be achieved by trying to dissect conscious experience into its sensory elements, or by reducing complex behavior to elementary stimulus-response units. Rather, their emphasis was on phenomenologically whole experiences, and before long their movement came to be identified with this catch phrase: The whole of an experience is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Three german gestalt pioneers emigrated from Europe to the US, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Hohler.

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