Law of Pragnanz

The law of Pragnanz, sometimes called the law of good Gestalt, is a foundational principle of Gestalt psychology holding that people tend to perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex visual scenes in the simplest, most regular, most orderly and most symmetrical form available, rather than in a more complicated or irregular way the same raw sensory information could equally support. As one of the organizing laws Gestalt psychologists proposed to describe how the visual system spontaneously groups incoming information into coherent wholes, it functions as a governing preference that shapes how the more specific Gestalt grouping principles, such as proximity, similarity and closure, resolve an ambiguous image in practice.