Ep.23. Is 'Gestalt' Simply a Matter of Perception?

"Intuition in the context of object perception: Intuitive gestalt judgments rest on the unconscious activation of semantic representations" by Annette Bolte and Thomas Goschke (2008) This paper investigates intuitive judgements in a perceptual task involving fragmented line drawings. The researchers wanted to determine if these intuitive judgements were based on unconsciously activated semantic representations of the objects depicted. They conducted three experiments using a modified version of the Waterloo Gestalt Closure Task, in which participants had to judge whether or not a fragmented line drawing depicted a meaningful object. They combined this task with a lexical decision task to measure whether presenting the fragments primed the corresponding object names. The authors found that participants were able to discriminate coherent fragments from incoherent or inverted fragments even when they could not consciously identify the object. Additionally, the results showed that coherent fragments primed the correct object names in the lexical decision task, suggesting that intuitive gestalt judgements are indeed based on unconscious semantic activation.

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