Laws of Seeing (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Lothar Spillmann (Translator), Steven Lehar (Translator), M. Stromeyer (Translator), Michael Wertheimer (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Laws of Seeing will inspire both beginning students and serious researchers in psychophysics, neurophysiology, and computational modeling in their search for a better understanding of why we see the way we do. The text is illustrated by numerous figures demonstrating to the reader how Gestalt factors work in the laboratory and in nature. This masterpiece should be read not as history, but as a beacon for future research."
—John S. Werner, Section of Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior, University of California, Davis

"This is a classic work in the Gestalt tradition of visual perception, and many of the issues Metzger touched upon continue to be major themes in current research. The translation is very well done."
—Pawan Sinha, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Product Description

This classic work in vision science, written by a leading figure in Germany's Gestalt movement in psychology and first published in 1936, addresses topics that remain of major interest to vision researchers today. Wolfgang Metzger's main argument, drawn from Gestalt theory, is that the objects we perceive in visual experience are not the objects themselves but perceptual effigies of those objects constructed by our brain according to natural rules. Gestalt concepts are currently being increasingly integrated into mainstream neuroscience by researchers proposing network processing beyond the classical receptive field. Metzger's discussion of such topics as ambiguous figures, hidden forms, camouflage, shadows and depth, and three-dimensional representations in paintings will interest anyone working in the field of vision and perception, including psychologists, biologists, neurophysiologists, and researchers in computational vision—and artists, designers, and philosophers.

Each chapter is accompanied by compelling visual demonstrations of the phenomena described; the book includes 194 illustrations, drawn from visual science, art, and everyday experience, that invite readers to verify Metzger's observations for themselves. Today's researchers may find themselves pondering the intriguing question of what effect Metzger's theories might have had on vision research if Laws of Seeing and its treasure trove of perceptual observations had been available to the English-speaking world at the time of its writing.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 229 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (September 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262134675
• ISBN-13: 978-0262134675
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,347,853 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost and re-discovered masterpiece, October 16, 2006

By	David H. Peterzell "Ph.D., Ph.D." (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Stay tuned for a longer review. I think it is great that there is so much new information about Gestalt Psychology being published in English. Perceptual and cognitive scientists will find great "new" ideas in Metzger's work. The book has instant credibility as far as I'm concerned because Lothar Spillmann and Michael Wertheimer were involved in the translation.

Two other books on Gestalt thinkers that I recommend highly:

Michael Wertheimer's book (coauthored by Brett King) on Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Psychology.

Ley's book on Wolfgang Kohler and the Apes of Tenerife.

"Laws of Seeing" (Metzger) contains many ideas that will be readily identified with other eminent Gestalt scholars (e.g., Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler), but contains remarkable "new" insights about a wide variety of perceptual phenomena. The "laws of seeing" are Gestalt laws, under the umbrella of the famous law of pragnanz, "which holds that stimuli organize themselves in the simplest, most symmetrical, and balanced manner." It anticipates a wide variety of phenomena (e.g., shape from shading) that were of great interest to later researchers. It is a small cloth-bound book, but contains an enormous amount of information in its text, illustrations, and many black and white photos.

Metzger's photos and illustrations are among the crowning achievements of this book, in that they capture essential aspects of the gestalt principles in ways that have, in some cases, been forgotten until now.

Spillman writes, "It makes one wonder what course research into vision and perception might have taken had this book been available to the English-speaking scientific community at the time of its writing. Many a rediscovery could have been saved, for example in the fields of shape-from-motion, depth-from-shading, context dependency, and viewpoint invariance, because the facts were known already several decades before. Take perception of isoluminant stimuli, which Susanne Liebmann reported in 1929. It is astonishing to find such a treasure trove of perceptual observations that, in the English-speaking world, have been known to so few."

Metzger concludes with a certain bravado regarding the primacy of psychology, observation and perceptual science, which is heartening. Here's a portion of his conclusion: "...even our spirit, and with it our peceptual experience, is an integral part of nature. True, it is a very special and certainly not the simplest part of nature, but in any case it is the only one that is immediately given to us. Every other science myst satisfy itself with indirect copies and representations of things, and those representations emerge in us only at the end of a long and complicated chain, by way of light waves or sound waves, through stimulus receptors on the body's surface, and through longer or shorter neural pathways, along which a good deal of information is lost along the way, or filtered out or distorted through the processing laws of the transmitting media. If this is so, then surely psychology offers more reliable information about the essence of being thanany other realm of knowledge, if we only try to look at things correctly and not let ourselves be led astray by the limited and indirect information of other sciences."