« Right, Its Time To Write | Home Help with Sums! » |
Sign up FREE to ToucanLearn to receive hundreds of activities, games and craft for preschool children!
Find out more...
Gestalt is a set of psychological principles, founded in Germany in the 1920's, that try to describe the way that we make sense of the world - the skills that set a 2 year old toddler apart from a robot!
There is no direct translation for the word Gestalt but it means something like 'essence' or 'form'. Several core principles make up our understanding of the world, and many children's toys and puzzles are aimed at practicing with real world interaction in order to make our own understanding of these principles. The principles include:-
Gestalt attempts to describe how, when we look out of the window, we convert a series of lines, colours and shapes into a meaningful view of trees, houses, cars and so on.
The principles begin to explain how we make sense of what we see, and also what we hear, around us. Take a tree as an example. To adults, and even young children, it is clear that a trunk, branches, leaves and flowers make up a tree, but to a newborn baby, there's no automatic connection between all of these parts that make it obvious that a tree is a single object. Over time a baby's brain forms the necessary connections required to interpret that the lines, shapes and colours that we see indeed make up a tree.
This understanding is formed using the principles of gestalt: branches are similar, there is continuation between the trunk and its branches, there is common fate amongst the leaves which all flutter in a similar way in a breeze, as do the branches which all move together in stronger wind. All of these clues lead us to be able to interpret a tree as being a unified object.
The amazing thing about babies and toddlers is that they are making these connections and learning and by the age of 2 years, they have a good grasp on all of this. Yet scientists have been trying to apply these same principles to robots for decades and yet still a robot is not able to interpret the world in the way that an untutored toddler can!
Once we form these connections, it is difficult for us to unlearn them, and there is a branch of psychology that believe that some forms of learning difficulty might arise from basic misinterpretation at an early age. If a toddler interprets the world along different principles, then it can be difficult to reprogramme the mind to work otherwise and that can lead to long term learning problems.
©2023 by ToucanLearn Ltd.
Credits: Secure CMS