Summary
The present decade has seen a resurgence of interest in perceptual phenomena investigated by Gestalt psychologists. Some of these new psychologies call themselves Neo-Gestalt psychology. Thus it seems appropriate to examine their relation to Gestalt psychology.
In addition to the problems they investigate, these new psychologies usually have in common an information-processing approach to perception. Thus information processing is compared with Gestalt psychology; the major issues to be considered are mechanism and atomism. In addition, a brief discussion of phenomenology is seen to be relevant to these new psychologies, quite apart from their relation to information processing. After a short discussion of these major issues, a still briefer examination of a few Neo-Gestalt psychologies and of the parallel distributed processing (PDP) approach is undertaken.
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This paper is a condensed and reorganized version of a chapter to be included in a forthcoming Festschrift for Solomon Asch, edited by Irvin Rock
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Henle, M. Some new gestalt psychologies. Psychol. Res 51, 81–85 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309361
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309361