Gestalt psychology is the school of psychology that sees experience and behavior (i. e. learning, perception, cognitive functions) as structured wholes and seeks to study the complexity, organization, and patterning of those wholes. Gestalt psychology rejected the theoretical basis of both structural psychology and behaviorism. The gestalt approach was founded by German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1921, Köhler was appointed as the director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, which became a center for Gestalt studies. Through experiments, gestalt psychologists determined that the mind creates its own patterns of organization on the stimuli that it experiences, rather than just storing that information like it’s a recording.  They devised the Gestalt law of transposition, which states that people and other animals they tested by creating a relationship between different elements from experience, transposed that relationship beyond their original experience, and to new circumstances.

Other rules that guide the process of creating a relationship between different elements from experience and perception are: 1) proximity (objects that are close belong together); 2) similarity (similar elements belong together); 3) continuity (continuous sensations belong together); 4) closure (people mentally fill in gaps in experience to create a whole); 5) texture (grouping of elements with a similar texture); 6) simplicity (grouping items together in the simplest way possible); and 7) common fate (objects that move in the same direction and at the same speed are grouped together). experiments on primates proved that they, and also humans, learn through  “insight learning,”, that is when test subjects find a solution to a problem by suddenly seeing it as a whole, rather than through behaviorist conditioning.  

Books:

Köhler, Wolfgang. Gestalt psychology (1929);

     -     The Task of Gestalt Psychology (1972).