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Principles of perceptual organization proposed by the early 20th-century German psychologists of the Gestalt school.

The psychologists in Germany who proposed the Gestalt principles of organization developed theories and research focusing on the effects of holistic patterns or configurations (the rough meaning of the German term Gestalt) on perception. Much of their work emphasized the concept that the whole affects the way in which parts are perceived: "the whole is more than the sum of its parts."

The Gestalt principles of organization involve observations about the ways in which we group together various stimuli to arrive at perceptions of patterns and shapes. For example, at the most basic level the principle of proximity leads us to group together objects that are close to each other spatially. We also have a...