Summary

Perceptual organization concerns the organization of people’s perception into meaningful, structured entities—often wholes containing parts, with specific interrelationships among the parts as well as specific relationships between the parts and the wholes. It embraces a wide variety of distinct processes, which often occur together in everyday life and lead to interesting perceptual experiences by their interactions. The best-known perceptual organization processes are perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization, which appear to be determined by characteristic principles or laws, such as grouping by proximity, similarity, good continuation, area, convexity, symmetry, and so forth. Other important phenomena of perceptual organization include perceptual multi-stability (i.e., the fact that the same stimulus can give rise to multiple competing percepts that switch over time), visual illusions, the role of reference frames, and the role of context.

Gestalt psychology has contributed deep insights into the way people’s perception of the world is organized, although it has also been criticized for its emphasis on subjective experiences and its sometimes vague and non-quantitative descriptions of the Gestalt principles. Because perceptual organization essentially concerns visual awareness, however, phenomenology is needed to describe what is experienced. This ultimately remains the basis for research on perceptual organization even when it is aimed at quantifying the principles of perceptual organization and identifying the neural correlates or mechanisms underlying perceptual organization.