Principles of Grouping

The principles of grouping, also called the Gestalt laws of grouping, are a set of principles first proposed by Gestalt psychologists to account for the observation that people naturally perceive objects as organized patterns and wholes rather than as disconnected parts, a tendency known as Pragnanz. Gestalt psychologists argued that these principles exist because the mind has an innate disposition to perceive patterns in a stimulus according to certain rules, and they organized the principles into five categories: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure and connectedness. The researchers Irvin Rock and Steve Palmer, who built on the earlier work of Max Wertheimer and identified additional grouping principles of their own, noted that Wertheimer's laws have come to be called the Gestalt laws of grouping but suggested that principles of grouping is perhaps a more appropriate description; their own research further developed Wertheimer's account of how people perceive groups of objects and how whole objects are formed from the parts that make them up.