Gestalt psychologists weren’t the first ones who utilized the psychological idea of Gestalt. In 1894, the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels describes Gestalt as an emergent property of a perceived object – the exact opposite of the main principle of Gestalt psychology.
Although Gestalt theory has had an impact across psychology, it has also been criticized for merely describing and not offering explanations of the cognitive processes involved in perceiving things. Later researchers have returned to the idea that people recognize patterns by recognizing the components of those patterns. Theories about pattern recognition assume that memories store sets of ‘object templates,’ which people compare with incoming information. The theories of pattern recognition were developed by the psychologist Irving Biederman who used simple geometrical shapes known as ‘geons’. Other theorists used the concept of ‘features’, which refers to identifiable physical properties of something, like the color, shape, and texture of an object. In order to detect features, people can scan a scene by scanning it systematically, looking for distinctive features. Features can be detected without having any explicit knowledge of what they represent. For example, we can see that a flower is red because the petals are red. We can also recognize a face without knowing exactly what the facial features are.
