Epilogue - Towards a Gestalt of perceptual organization

Summary

The germ of the ideas presented in this book took root in the minds of the early twentieth-century Gestalt psychologists. They argued that perceptual organization involves a complex interaction between parts to arrive at wholes, and they proposed the Law of Prägnanz as governing principle. This law expresses the idea that the brain, like any dynamic physical system, tends to settle in relatively stable neural states characterized by cognitive properties such as symmetry, harmony, and simplicity. In the 1960s, this holistic idea was overshadowed by the rise of single-cell recording (which marks the beginning of modern neuroscience), but in the 1970s, it started to return to the mainstream of cognitive neuroscience. Nowadays, not only representational approaches like structural information theory (SIT) but also connectionism and dynamic systems theory (DST) tend to trace their origins back to this idea — even though they use quite different tools to implement it in formal models.

In this book, I made a case for a multidisciplinary approach to perceptual organization, precisely because different tools are needed to address the different questions of (a) what the nature is of the mental representations of percepts; (b) how cognitive processes proceed to yield these representations; and (c) how these processes and representations are neurally realized. To address these questions, I used SIT as operating base, but if one looks beyond the differences in tools, then the conceptual parallels between SIT, connectionism, and DST seem to prevail.