Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper examines the tremendous similarities between the Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes that are a central part of many connectionist models and the Gestalt principles that played a central role in the history of Psychology. Gestalt Psychology played a major role in a number of areas in psychology, such as perception, reasoning and problem solving, causal reasoning, and many key aspects of social psychology, such as social perception, group interaction, and belief consistency. Many of the key assumptions of Gestalt Psychology have resurfaced in recent connectionist models. W e propose that Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes provide a computational implementation of many of the central principles of Gestalt Psychology. In this paper we discuss the clear parallels between each of five key assumptions of Gestalt Psychology and aspects of Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes. The five assumptions we examine are: (1) psychological processing can be treated as interactions in fields of forces, (2) psychological processing is holistic, (3) the whole is greater than the sum its parts, (4) the importance of the structure of cognitive elements; how things are connected and related, and (5) the emphasis on cognitive dynamics, and such concepts as change, equilibrium, and tension.