32
3 Gestalt
the case, because in a complex recollection there is too much information
to store verbatim. The amazing capacity of human memory would exceed
its physical support if it weren’t for some feats of encryption which we don’t
understand.
A series of experiments on Gestalt memory for pictures was conducted beginning in the mid-1970s. Successive experiments were carried out by different
laboratories because the first reports to appear in print seemed hard to believe.
One of the most definitive studies was carried out in 1973 by the Canadian
cognitive scientist Lionel Standing and published under the title “Learning
10,000 Pictures”. The sizes of the learning sets in these experiments were in
the range of 1,000 and up to 10,000 pictures. In the learning phase, subjects
were given 5 seconds to view each item, with a half second interval between
pictures. In the testing phase, what was evaluated was recognition memory:
Given two or three pictures side by side, a subject was asked to indicate which
was the one presented during the experiment. 4
Two days after viewing the pictures, subjects had a recognition test, and
it was found that 88 percent of them were recalled correctly. When a test
was given on the same day the pictures were viewed, the accuracy was 99.6
percent. In another kind of test, instead of picking out the right picture, subjects
provided the gist of what they had seen. The results were no less impressive.
Not surprisingly, Standing found that humans recall pictures far better than
words. Indeed, pictures are well-structured Gestalts, and that’s what we are
designed to remember.
In the words of Lionel Standing, “The capacity of recognition memory
for pictures is almost limitless.” This is an astonishing fact: It is hard for us
to remember verbatim sentences—for example poems or the lines of a play.
It is even harder to remember sequences of numbers. But when it comes to
remembering richly detailed displays, we remember effortlessly. There could be
no more convincing evidence that human and animal minds grasp the world
in Gestalt wholes.
Seeing the Whole Picture
It is a strange irony that the things which are the most familiar to us—things
we live with day and night—often go unnoticed. Perhaps they’re too close to
be perceived. For example, we are all conscious beings, and nothing is more
present to us than the uninterrupted flow of conscious experience. Yet until
recently there was no word in our language for consciousness as we understand
it today: Rather, the word was conflated with conscience, in the moral sense.
3 Gestalt
the case, because in a complex recollection there is too much information
to store verbatim. The amazing capacity of human memory would exceed
its physical support if it weren’t for some feats of encryption which we don’t
understand.
A series of experiments on Gestalt memory for pictures was conducted beginning in the mid-1970s. Successive experiments were carried out by different
laboratories because the first reports to appear in print seemed hard to believe.
One of the most definitive studies was carried out in 1973 by the Canadian
cognitive scientist Lionel Standing and published under the title “Learning
10,000 Pictures”. The sizes of the learning sets in these experiments were in
the range of 1,000 and up to 10,000 pictures. In the learning phase, subjects
were given 5 seconds to view each item, with a half second interval between
pictures. In the testing phase, what was evaluated was recognition memory:
Given two or three pictures side by side, a subject was asked to indicate which
was the one presented during the experiment. 4
Two days after viewing the pictures, subjects had a recognition test, and
it was found that 88 percent of them were recalled correctly. When a test
was given on the same day the pictures were viewed, the accuracy was 99.6
percent. In another kind of test, instead of picking out the right picture, subjects
provided the gist of what they had seen. The results were no less impressive.
Not surprisingly, Standing found that humans recall pictures far better than
words. Indeed, pictures are well-structured Gestalts, and that’s what we are
designed to remember.
In the words of Lionel Standing, “The capacity of recognition memory
for pictures is almost limitless.” This is an astonishing fact: It is hard for us
to remember verbatim sentences—for example poems or the lines of a play.
It is even harder to remember sequences of numbers. But when it comes to
remembering richly detailed displays, we remember effortlessly. There could be
no more convincing evidence that human and animal minds grasp the world
in Gestalt wholes.
Seeing the Whole Picture
It is a strange irony that the things which are the most familiar to us—things
we live with day and night—often go unnoticed. Perhaps they’re too close to
be perceived. For example, we are all conscious beings, and nothing is more
present to us than the uninterrupted flow of conscious experience. Yet until
recently there was no word in our language for consciousness as we understand
it today: Rather, the word was conflated with conscience, in the moral sense.