Gestalt psychology

Selective Attention – the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus, as in the cocktail party effect. Visual Capture – the tendency for vision to dominate the other senses. Gestalt – an organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasize our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes. Figure-Ground – the organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings. Grouping – the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups. Depth perception – the ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance. Visual cliff – a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals.