Untersuchen zur Lehre von der Gestalt - 1 Wertheimer on organizing principles of perceptual grouping Max Wertheimer was one the more famous gestalt researchers. We aren't interested here in exactly what this slogan was meant to convey. The slogan was meant to convey the gestaltist's belief that this process of composition probably wasn't a simple one. This slogan can be understood a bit better if we get a little more technical.
Summation is, of course, an additive process.
That is, the 3 that appears in bold, and in fact the whole equation yields the same result regardless of the context. The gestaltist were suggesting that we really had to consider the context in which some element occurred in order to understand how it contributed to the whole or gestalt. They thought that the mind rarely combined things or organized things independent of the context in which they appear. The fact that their are two ways of viewing configurations of this sort was very important to the arguments that went on between the gestaltists and behaviorists during the earlier part of the 20th century. On one view, an absolute or context independent view, we place the center rectangle of the top figure and the left and right rectangles of the lower figure into the same equivalence class because they are exactly the same size and shape.