PLEASE CITE AS: Mungan (2021a) Geştalt kuramının az bilinen çalışmaları: Bellek [Gestalt theory’s less known studies:

Memory], Nesne, 9(19), 147-175. DOI: 10.7816/nesne-09-19-12 [approximate English translation on psyarxiv, link]

Still ahead of their time:

Gestalt theory's intriguing ideas and research in memory

Esra Mungan

Boğaziçi University

NOTE: This is the English translation of my Turkish article on Gestalt theory and memory which was

published February 2021 in Nesne. Just as the English translation of my first Gestalt article (see

https://psyarxiv.com/e4m5t/), this, too, is a liberal translation where I felt the need to add or slightly elaborate

one or two parts. The English title was changed based on the feedback of one of my reviewers. Yet to prevent

confusion, I decided to keep the translated original title on the introduction page of the manuscript.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Again, I cannot thank Riccardo Luccio and Lydia Maniatis enough for

their incredible guidance and encouragement to write about Gestalt theory. Moreover, it was Lydia

Maniatis who drew my attention to a person I had never known of despite the fact that I did my PhD on

memory: Erich Goldmeier. How I wished he had been “seen” by the mainstream scholars of memory

research. I also want to thank Reşit Canbeyli, Hıdır İlyas Göz, Hasan Gürkan Tekman, and Zehra F.

Peynircioğlu for their valuable feedback.

Email: esra.mungan@boun.edu.tr

Abstract

This article is a sequel to “Gestalt Theory: Its Past, its Stranding, and its Future.” The aim of this article is

to bring to light the conceptual and empirical contributions of Gestalt theory within the field of memory.

It is typically believed that Gestalt theory is a theory about perception only. This, however, is not true.

The first part of the article discusses some critical thoughts about memory processes as presented by Kurt

Koffka in his Principles of Gestalt (1936) book. These involve Koffka’s proposal about the involvement

and effects of memory processes in the perception of successive Gestalts; a discussion of the similarities

and differences between percepts and memory traces; Koffka’s reference to research suggesting that

memory traces are dynamic such that, depending on their Prägnanz, they will or will not change during

storage in a way that can even be predicted in some cases. The article then reviews one of the most

powerful empirical studies on memory within a Gestalt framework, i.e., Hedwig von Restorff’s 1933

dissertation demonstrating figure-ground dynamics in memory tasks. In the final part of this article, I

present the main ideas of an utterly ignored memory researcher, Erich Goldmeier, from his 1982 book

The Memory Trace: Its Formation and Its Fate. It is dismaying that these very original and interesting

studies went unnoticed by mainstream cognitive psychology.

GESTALT MEMORY 5

Gestalt Theory’s Less Known Studies: Memory

Source: Erich Goldmeier (1982)

1. Introduction

In this article I will review and discuss Gestalt theory’s approach and work on memory. Gestalt

theory was born a century ago and continues to exist till today, although no longer with its impressive

theoretical grounding but rather as a simplified, almost caricaturized, and even distorted version of it (cf.

Maniatis, 2021a, 2021b; Mungan, 2020). This theory has been known to contribute mostly to the area of

perception, and even not all of perception but mostly visual perception, despite the fact that within their

proposals on perception there were almost as many references to auditory perception as there were to

visual perception. Surely, their proposals were not restricted to the visual and auditory domains either,

since perception was regarded as a whole. While scholars working on problem solving have always

known about the work of Gestalt theorists in their domain (cf. Mungan, 2021b), scholars working on

memory seem to completely have missed or ignored Gestalt theory’s proposals on memory. The goal of

this paper is to make visible again what has been turned invisible. The most conspicuous proposal of

Gestalt theory within the domain of memory is its claim that the memory trace is a Gestalt, that it is a

dynamic trace that is subject to change even during storage due to possibly predictable Prägnanz

dynamics. In that sense, for Gestalt theory, whereas continual change is an exception rather than a norm

in perception (e.g. ambiguous figures), it is a norm rather than an exception in memory.

The present article will start with the chapters on learning and memory in Koffka’s 1936 book

Principles of Gestalt, a book that even today would be a very inspiring textbook. The aforementioned

sections, in which Koffka covers, discusses and provides examples for the “dynamic memory trace”

GESTALT MEMORY 6

proposal, make up no less than a third of his 685 pages long book! This is yet one more clear example

that memory was not something “left out” in Gestalt theory as today’s scholars like to believe. In his

book, Koffka also makes multiple references to Hedwig von Restorff’s1 PhD thesis which she did under

the supervision of Wolfgang Köhler. Her important contribution was to apply one of Gestalt theory’s

most important proposals, the figure-ground conceptualization, to a memory setting. The article will

subsequently discuss Koffka’s emphases regarding the relationship between learning and memory and the

attention he draws to the phenomenon of implicit memory.

In the second half of this article, I will discuss Erich Goldmeier’s 1982 book The Memory Trace:

Its Formation and Its Fate which, despite its extremely interesting and intriguing studies, went unnoticed

in mainstream memory research within cognitive psychology. Despite its having been written 40 years

ago, this book, I believe, is still deeply inspiring for any cognitivist, and for that matter, for any

psychologist. Because of the article’s wide range of headings and subheadings, Table 1 is intended to

help the reader orient themselves.

Table 1

Outline of the Article

CONTENTS

1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 5

Table 1 ..................................................................................................................................................................... 6

2. Kurt Koffka’s Analysis and Proposal on Learning and Memory ................................................................ 7

2.1 Gestalt formations in successive sequences (“Successive Gestalts”) ............................................................... 8

2.2 Are perception and memory processed in similar parts of the brain? ............................................................. 10

2.3 The Gestalts of memory traces ....................................................................................................................... 10

2.4 Dynamic properties of memory Gestalts ....................................................................................................... 11

2.5 The difficulty of learning the monotone ......................................................................................................... 13

2.5.1 Hedwig von Restorff (1906-1962)‘s 1933 dissertation........................................................................... 14

2.5.2 The change dynamics of mnemonic and perceptual traces ..................................................................... 18

2.6 Learning and remembering: Friedrich Wulf’s 1922 study and dynamic memory trace theory ...................... 21

1 For a stimulating article on two brilliant women of Gestalt theory, Hedwig von Restorff and Bluma Vulfovna Zeigarnik, see

MacLeod (2020).

GESTALT MEMORY 7

2.7 Does incessant repeating lead to learning? ..................................................................................................... 25

2.8 First implicit memory tests: Claparède 1911, Maccurdy 1928 ...................................................................... 31

3. Erich Goldmeier’s Studies ............................................................................................................................. 31

3.1 What can be called “same”? .......................................................................................................................... 36

3.2 What is singularity? ....................................................................................................................................... 37

3.3 What is encoded? .......................................................................................................................................... 40

3.3.1 The difference between looking and seeing ........................................................................................... 41

3.3.2 Encoding the non-existent, not encoding the existent… ........................................................................ 42

3.3.3 Processes that stabilize memory traces… ............................................................................................... 44

3.3.4 Grouping, meaning-making, noticing and encoding a Gestalt ................................................................ 44

3.4 Phenomenal asymmetries in stimuli .............................................................................................................. 45

3.5 The sine qua non of memory experiments ..................................................................................................... 46

3.6 Main findings of Goldmeier’s empirical studies ........................................................................................... 47

4. Finishing remarks, in place of a conclusion ................................................................................................. 50

5. References ....................................................................................................................................................... 52

2. Kurt Koffka’s Analysis and Proposal on Learning and Memory

Gestalt theorists appear to focus on the concept of “memory traces” when talking about memory.

Koffka also uses the term “engram” 2. But unlike Semon and later scholars of memory who followed in

his footsteps, for Gestaltists, a memory trace is not a static trace. This perspective is somewhat unusual

even today but was so particularly back then, if one considers that the formation and retrieval of

memories had been discussed for a long time using metaphors such as the gramophone or the camera (cf.

Roediger, 1980). A gramophone, for instance, apart from some additional noise that occurs during

replay, does no more than play back what is recorded on the grooves of a record. This idea of recording

and faithful replay (i.e., in which ever way something is engraved into the brain network, that is how it

will remain and be ready for future play back or replay) is still surprisingly prominent particularly in

neuroscience (cf. Sutherland & McNaughton, 2000; Eichenbaum, 2013, but also see Olafsdottir et al.,

2018 for some signs of change regarding this rather static position of the engram). In cognitive

psychology, in turn, the most prominently discussed change is the weakening of a memory trace due to

2 The first person to propose the term “engram” was the German zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard W. Semon

(1859-1918), who was working on a brain-based organic model of memory. As such, “engram” refers to a property of long-

term memory.

GESTALT MEMORY 8

disuse or some changes in its accessibility due interference or inhibition of competing traces. Even the

immense false memory literature of the past 30-40 years (e.g., Roediger and McDermott, 1995;

McCloskey ve Zaragoza, 1985; Zaragoza, Belli, & Payment, 2007) mostly talks about changes and

overwritings of the original memory encodings as caused via manipulations in-between encoding and

retrieval (or simply during retrieval, as in the misinformation effect, cf. Loftus & Hoffman, 1989; Loftus,

2005). This is quite different from proposing (even warning?) that changes in a memory trace can occur

as it “rests in the mind”. Such a proposal is not only frightening but also rather difficult to study

scientifically, which might explain the reluctance to endorse this possibility. Other than the Gestaltists,

the person who came closest to considering this possibility, daring to look into this with considerable

creativity, was most likely Frederic C. Bartlett (cf. Bartlett, 1932). Unsurprisingly, Gestalt theorists

mention Bartlett and his work a couple of times in their writings but they also had some important

criticisms about his work, which I will discuss in the last section of this article.

2.1 Gestalt formations in successive sequences (“Successive Gestalts”)

Gestalt theory approaches each aspect of memory formation, storage and retrieval again from a

Gestaltist perspective. Its greatest objection to the empiristic3, mechanistic accounts is that, whether in

perception or memory, stimuli are not researched in their wholeness but rather in fragmented,

decomposed forms. Koffka gives a nice example to show why this approach is problematic. To begin

with, he remarks that the processing of successive (i.e., temporally unfolding) sequences relies not only

on perceptual but also on memory-related functions. For this, he gives a rhythmic example, as rhythmic

processing was his dissertation topic. When someone hears a pulse sequence such as xxXxxXxxX

(x=unaccented, X=accented), they will hear a beat.4 A grouping of triples (xxX or Xxx) will emerge

quite naturally (cf. “emergent properties”, Palmer, 1999). Gestaltists noted that compared to

3 Köhler (1950) coins the term “empiristic” to refer to experimentalists who knowingly or unknowingly subscribe to a simple,

mechanistic, associationistic view. As such, he separates those from scholars with an in-depth empiricist philosophy. 4 These type of groupings are discussed in detail by Max Wertheimer (see Wertheimer’s still not fully translated 1923 article;

for a detailed treatise on Wertheimer (1923), see Mungan, 2020)

GESTALT MEMORY 9

simultaneous Gestalt formations, successive (visual, auditory, tactile or other) Gestalt formations involve

more intense use of memory processes (which we today would call working memory processes). Hence,

the perception of an X in isolation is quite different compared to the perception of an X preceded by two

unaccented x pulses. Likewise, in a sequence of xxX groups, the perception of the first X is not the same

compared to the perception of the subsequent Xs because now we have a memory formation. Therefore,

if we happen to drop one or even more than one of the Xs in the sequence (e.g., xxXxxXxx_xx_xxX), the

holistic triple Gestalt formation (xxX) will not dissolve. In music, such occasional omissions are used to

break monotony without breaking the overall beat which holds the entire piece together.

After giving the xxX sequencing example, Koffka then proceeds to another example where this

time X is the unaccented pulse in the series XXXXXXXX pointing to the fact that now, the same X is

an unaccented pulse in the context of its neighboring X. Hence, what gives a certain pulse the property

of being ‘accented’ or ‘unaccented’ is not its physical decibel but the proportion of the two different

decibels. On the other hand, what is common between the two sequences is their triple beat property, that

is, their Gestalts. Now consider a situation where the listener simply forgets each preceding pulse. If that

happened no Gestalt would emerge5. Koffka furthermore remarks, referring to both music and language,

that the last note in a melody or the last word in a sentence does not only arise from the just preceding

note or word but is already contained in the entire musical or linguistic sentence. Here he emphasizes yet

another critical point. When hearing do re mi fa, we hear a holistic melody. However, this melody is not

a simple result of sequentiality per se because if in the transition from mi to fa a honking sound interferes,

it will not naturally become a part of the successive Gestalt. In other words, it will not turn do-re-mi-fa

5 This issue (and, for that matter, the intriguing issue of chunking in working memory) is still not studied sufficiently. For

instance, if listeners are presented with an auditory sequence which does not allow for a clear grouping, say a sequence of

pulses of various, random decibels (e.g., xxxxxxxxxx….), they would have a hard time to retain each preceding pulse due to

its unpredictability. Grouping is one of the most important factors predicting working memory capacity (cf. Ericsson, Chase, &

Faloon, 1980). It is of no surprise that all music across the world has some kind of beat, i.e., regularity.

GESTALT MEMORY 10

into do-re-mi-honk-fa because the honking sound is not part of the musical system, hence does not belong

to the musical “whole”6.

2.2 Are perception and memory processed in similar parts of the brain?

Koffka asks whether perception and memory are processed in the same brain regions. In one of

his dissertation experiments, participants were presented with a rhythmic light pulse appearing in the

center of a screen. While the brightness of the light pulse was kept constant, a rhythm was created by

varying the inter-stimulus durations. At the end of the sequence, participants were asked to continue its

rhythm in their minds for a while and thereafter, to reproduce it by tapping. He observed that participants

were doing the task by grouping the pulse sequence and, most importantly, that they did not remain loyal

to the exact time intervals between pulses. This finding made him conclude that perceptual7 versus

mnemonic time might be processed in different brain regions. He further remarks that when one

remembers an event, say a walk along the shore, one is able to reinstate, i.e., phenomenally re-experience,

the spatial flow though not exactly the temporal flow of it. Instead, the temporal flow seems conceptually

“added” to the memory rather than being phenomenally replayed. On this basis, he concludes that during

the perception of the temporal flow of successive Gestalts different brain regions might be involved

compared to those active when re-instating the temporal flow later on.8

2.3 The Gestalts of memory traces

Koffka asks whether the reason why we seem unable to retain durational information (e.g., if we

use the same ‘taking a stroll along the shore’ example, remembering, for instance, how long one stopped

at a given moment to watch the ocean) could be related to the figure-ground dynamics of Gestalt. Here

Koffka makes reference to Hedwig von Restorff’s dissertation studies where she showed that

6 Certainly, experimental music can make such external sounds part of a musical whole by using rhythmic integration or

massed repetition. 7 Since there is no sensory receptor for time processing, we have to call it a perception rather than a sensation. 8 While we know today that there are different brain regions with different temporal resolutions, we still do not know how the

brain processes and stores time in its entirety (cf. Buhusi, 2020; Ünal & Ayhan, 2020)

GESTALT MEMORY 11

participants’ memory was quite bad for successively presented items if they belonged to the same kind

(e.g., a series of numbers or a series of more or less similar drawings), hence carried an inconspicuous

‘ground’ quality, but impressive if they belonged to a different kind compared to the other ones (e.g., a

drawing among a series of various numbers, or a number among a series of drawings), hence carried a

conspicuous, figural quality. This study was important in revealing that figure-ground differentiation was

playing a role not only in perception but also memory. Based on this finding, Koffka asks whether the

duration of an event might be experienced like a ground perception and that because of time’s more

homogenous ground quality, we may have a hard time remembering durations accurately when recalling

an event. If there is indeed no concrete region responsible for the recording of duration, this line of

reasoning does, I believe, deserve attention even today.

In summary, Gestalt theory proposes that memory traces are organized systems and that apart

from the memory trace itself, its pattern is also a carrier of memory. To make the latter more explicit,

Koffka gives a few examples. In one example he draws attention to how we can hum back a melody

starting from a different note after first hearing (hence without ever having heard it starting from that

note). And this is the case even though we could as well have hummed it along in its original register.

Hence, as we hum back the tune later on not from its, say, original “do” but from “mi”, we are not

literally recalling the original notes themselves but their pattern. Likewise, someone who has learned to

read and write can read completely unfamiliar handwritings because what they learned was not the literal

shapes of the letters but their overall, holistic configurations, says Koffka.

2.4 Dynamic properties of memory Gestalts

Koffka talks about an interesting finding in studies that measure perceptual thresholds (e.g., the

smallest noticeable pitch or brightness difference) that psychophysical laws have a hard time explaining.

When presenting stimulus pairs not simultaneously but sequentially, some asymmetric findings emerge.

For instance, difference thresholds in comparisons of object weights were smaller when the first object

was lighter than the second. In other words, a {light heavy} line-up rendered a smaller threshold than

GESTALT MEMORY 12

a {heavy light} line-up with exactly the same weights in reverse order. The critical difference,

according to Koffka, is that a simultaneous presentation creates a perceptual task whereas a sequential

presentation involves a memory component. 9 This finding is in line with Gestalt theory which claims

that the x’s and X’s in xX and Xx are perceived differently due to the difference in the configurations

they are in. A related finding comes from one of Köhler’s studies. When presenting a consecutive,

equal-accented (X-X) pulse pair with an ISI of less than 4 seconds, the second pulse was heard as softer.

In contrast, when the ISI was larger than 4 seconds, the second pulse was heard as louder. Again, from a

Gestalt perspective, we are likely seeing the effect of grouping. If the ISI is below 4 seconds, one might

conjecture that X-X is perceived as one group (hence the second pulse being “shadowed” by the first

pulse, the pulse which starts the group), whereas at an ISI that is above 4 seconds, the two consecutive

Xs are segregated (and hence the second X is a salient first element of a new group, hence it is perceived

as if louder than the just preceding X).

At this point, it is worth mentioning a comment by Köhler (1918, cited in Koffka, 1936). Köhler

remarks that in a task of judging two consecutive stimuli (be it based on their weight, their brightness or

any other property), what seems to be happening is not so much an analytical comparison of the retained

image of the first stimulus (hence its memory trace) and the currently perceived second one, but rather a

very quick, spontaneous, almost automatic “same/different” judgment. Köhler points out that the

moment the participant is perceiving the second stimulus they seem to know whether it is heavier,

brighter or whatever the property of interest. The idea here is that if the two stimuli are perceived as one

group, hence as one Gestalt, the awareness of the sameness or difference between the two is like an

emergent property. In this example we once more see how careful and detail-oriented Gestaltist were in

the way they inspected observed phenomena. Instead of a rote collection of psychophysical data and

9 We found a similar threshold asymmetry in some of our studies (e.g. Mungan ve Kaya, 2020). There is yet no explanation for

these. We know that Barbara Tillmann’s lab also found such asymmetries (Barbara Tillmann, personal communication).

Sadly, because of either an ambition or pressure to keep things “simple”, psychophysical studies almost without exception

report difference thresholds not separately (i.e., thresholds obtained in ascending vs. descending conditions) but as averages

(i.e., the two conditions collapsed). This way, this rather curious asymmetry managed to go unnoticed again for the decades to

follow…

GESTALT MEMORY 13

calculation of thresholds, Gestaltists made careful observations about participant behavior as well as their

phenomenal experience. This very sensitivity allowed them to understand more complex dynamics that

would otherwise go unnoticed. Max Wertheimer’s 1912 phi phenomenon article is yet another powerful

example of how critical it is to not just collect simple reaction time or accuracy data but also place value

on the experiences of participants to discover what otherwise would remain undiscovered.

2.5 The difficulty of learning the monotone

Why is it so difficult or even impossible to learn monotonous events? Koffka starts this section

with a 1913 study by empirist Georg Elias Müller. Müller notices that when Ebbinghaus’ nonsense

syllable lists were read in a monotonous way, without accenting, they were not learnt at all. This is an

important point because in his 1885 book, Ebbinghaus reports that he read the lists to himself with a

certain rhythmic grouping (stressing every four or five syllables). This information is mentioned almost

in passing, as a single sentence under the section where he describes his experimental setup. To my

knowledge, this critical information has gone completely unnoticed in mainstream cognitive psychology.

One almost suspects that its English translation was not read with the care it deserved. Sadly, when

referencing such classical works (and Ebbinghaus’s 1885 work appears to be cited 2264 times which is

likely to be an underestimate), the works themselves no longer seem to be read that much. Anyone who

works on memory should have immediately noticed that little sentence since we all know how critical

rhythm is for memory if one only remembers the role of rhythmic narratives such as poems and legends

in pre-literate human cultures. The empirist contemporaries of the Gestaltists were aware of the potential

importance of the rhythmic component in Ebbinghaus’ experiments, leading them to notice that without

rhythm those nonsense syllable lists were not learned. Yet, this finding constitutes a problem for the

associationistic, empiristic viewpoint which sees repetitive, consecutive learning as sufficient for the

formation of memories. Things like rhythm, meter, grouping, factors that clearly play a role both in

perception and memory, are not easy to deal with from an empirist’s perspective. For example, in an

ab/cde stimulus, that is, a stimulus where “ab” is grouped against “cde” (say via a slight accent on “a”

GESTALT MEMORY 14

and “c”), the ability of “a” to trigger “b” is more than the ability of “b” to trigger the post-grouping

element “c” even if the durational gaps between all 5 elements are kept exactly the same (cf. Bower ve

Winzenz, 1969; Restle, 1970). This phenomenon is rather difficult to explain within the empiristic

tradition. The most it can come up with is something like some prior knowledge of the “ab” and “cde”

groups leading to this result. Yet, what then to expect in an immediate regrouping of ab/cde to abc/de.

For Gestalt theory the answer is simple and in line with the findings: now the ability of “b” to trigger “c”

would be stronger than for “c” to trigger “d”. What could an empirist now say? Claiming that the slight

accent on “d” creates some attentional interference which decreases the triggering power of “c” to “d” is

probably not a very convincing explanation. In other words, the short-cut, often imaginary “past

experience” joker card may not work anymore, nor any other explanation that ignores the grouping

phenomenon. What is consistent in both cases is that the triggering power of consecutive elements within

a group is always stronger than that for consecutive elements across groups.

From a Gestalt perspective rhythmic structure is important because it creates groupings. Once

there is grouping, there is a figure that can segregate itself against a ground and as such make itself more

memorable. After stating this, Koffka goes on to discuss in detail von Restorff’s findings of her series of

studies looking at long-term memory performance in a variety of stimulus sets, various durational

manipulations, tested on a range of age groups, including children. In his 2020 “retrospective” on

Hedwig von Restorff, MacLeod rightfully calls her dissertation a “tour de force”.

2.5.1 Hedwig von Restorff (1906-1962)‘s 1933 dissertation

Hedwig von Restorff’s thesis focuses on the process of assuming figure or ground characteristics

as memory traces interrelate with each other. In her thesis, she reports a total of eleven studies, the first

four of which might be seen as pilot studies. Instead of presenting each of her studies one by one, I will

focus on two studies which nicely reflect the main idea of her work. The general structure of her

experiments was like this: Participants received a list of 10 successive items which were presented at a

regular 1.5-second per item rate; after this, all participants received a 10-min distractor task where they

GESTALT MEMORY 15

were asked to read a text for future rote recall; after this they were given a free recall task where they

were to write all the items they remembered from the previous list, regardless of their order of

appearance. 10 The critical variable was the configuration of the lists. Each list’s second (or third) item

was of a different type compared to the remaining nine items. In some lists, that item was a 2-digit

number amongst nine nonsense syllables, in some it was just the opposite, a nonsense syllable amongst

nine 2-digit numbers (Figure 1a and 1b, respectively). In addition, to serve as a control, there was a fully

heterogeneous list with ten items which were all of a different type (Figure 1c). In each session,

participants would receive a single list and between sessions there would be a time interval of at least one

day. The first session would always start with the control list of heterogeneous items. The experiment

consisted of three sessions, each session with a different list configuration.

Figure 1a-c (1a and 1b items were constructed by the author for representation purposes; the control list in 1c, on the other hand, includes

the different types of images as they were described in von Restorff, 1933)

Findings were clear. In the experimental lists (Fig.1a and Fig.1b), each of the “ground” items, that is the

items that were all of the same kind, were remembered on average 22% of the time11, whereas the recall

10 After the recall test, participants were asked to write down the text they had to memorize in phase 2 to ensure they would not

suspect that that phase was simply a distractor phase.

11 I think that this figure-ground conceptualization of Gestalt theory, be it within the domain of perception, memory, or

problem solving, allows for very interesting predictions and understandings of various disconnected “phenomena” listed in

mainstream psychology books. For instance, we know that people have a tendency to believe that a head/tail sequence such as

HHHHHHH is less likely than a sequence such as HTTHTTT (cf. Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). This could as well be

understood from a Gestalt perspective, in that the former has the qualities of a singular, prägnant shape, i.e., is a figure (

GESTALT MEMORY 16

rate for the critical “figure” item (i.e., of “sül” in Fig. 1a and “19” in Fig. 1b) was around 70%. The

average recall rate of any given item in the control list, on the other hand, was 40%. The most critical part

of this simple and elegant experiment was that by the time participants encountered the distinct item (e.g.,

“sül” in Fig.1a), they could not know yet that it was different from all the other items because of the fully

mixed control list which each participant had received as their Day 1 list. This was also the reason why

the distinct item was presented in the second (or third) position. If it had been presented towards the end

of the list it would have drawn extra attention, something that von Restorff wanted to prevent. Anyone

who would read “67 – sül – ” the day after receiving the control list would not likely pay any extra

attention to “sül”. More important, “sül” in a list such as in Figure 1a will gain its “singularity” only as

the list goes on. In other words, “sül” assumes its singular status only post hoc, which in turn is only

possible through a memory process. Von Restorff furthermore explains the 40% recall rate in the control

list as still some kind of a ground memory performance since in a list where every single item is different

from the other, there is again a certain type of homogeneity emerging from full irregularity. In a list

where each item is of a different type (where none of the types stand out from the other types), none of

the ten items can assume the quality of singularity after all.

In another experiment, the setup was more or less the same, except that this time instead of a free

recall test, a recognition test was used where participants had to identify which items were presented from

among a list of presented and novel items. Moreover, this time participants were high-school students.

Findings were rather similar: the average rate of recognition for a ground versus a figure item was 22%

vs. 100%, respectively. On the other hand, the average rate of recognition of the corresponding second

item in the control list was 56%, i.e., again a value in-between the recognition rates of the two contrasting

(figure vs. ground type) target items. Hence, when looking at these results with today’s knowledge, we

hence of low likelihood), whereas the latter appears like any of those random alterations that are hard to differentiate, hence is

seen as a ground ( as more likely because most of the sequences are of this kind). Hence, it could be for this reason why the

latter is failed to be perceived in its unique, figural form. In other words, unlike Tversky and Kahneman’s proposal that we are

dealing with a mere fallacy in thinking we might propose that what is happening is a perceptual, even mnemonic phenomenon

where the distinct HHHHHHH is retained flawlessly whereas the alternating sequence cannot be retained in its singularity due

to its ground character.

GESTALT MEMORY 17

can say that the lower performance of ground items in the free recall setup was likely not an artifact of

output interference (cf. Roediger, 1978) as it was also observed in a recognition test setting. 12 Von

Restorff uses the term “monotone” to emphasize that items of such quality have a lower chance of

forming memorable memory traces compared to items that carry a certain singularity within a whole.

Critically, as also emphasized by Koffka, it is not the item per se that carries a quality of singularity.

Hence, an item type that was monotone in one list could turn into a distinctive one in another list,

depending on the items that “surround” it. In other words, whether an item has figure status or not does

not have to depend on the specific features of the item per se but may as well arise from its relative status

within a given environment.13

Both von Restorff and Koffka touch upon comparable instances of monotony in daily life.

Allusively, von Restorff remarks that the nonsensical, disconnected, monotonous stimuli in the

experiments of researchers like Ebbinghaus and Georg Elias Müller were not necessarily removed from

the reality of daily life where within its boring and monotonous rhythm people are indeed doomed to

forget most of the things they experienced through the very forgetting mechanisms proposed by those

empirists. Koffka likewise gives an example of a person whose daily routine was to wind their

wristwatch before bed (those were the times when watches needed to be winded to ensure that they would

not stop). They would remember their act of winding their watch that evening, but later on they would

not keep any memory of any of the separate acts of winding anymore. In other words, such routine,

monotonous acts do not turn into memories. This process of the monotonous to turn into a “ground”,

hence becoming less and less memorable, can be seen in many other real life examples. As one gets

older with a more and more settled life, every day becomes more routine, more cliché and the events

12 In free recall, the recall of a given item will not only influence the next item to be recalled but with every next recall, the

chances of the remaining items to be recalled will decrease as each recalled word creates interference with the to be recalled

upcoming items. Hence, as output increases, recalling additional items becomes less and less likely. 13 In a critical footnote, von Restorff states that if the items in a given category form a meaningful whole, they no longer are

monotonic but instead are well-remembered in later tests. She then cites a few studies that showed this. Interestingly, this

phenomenon was presented as a novel finding in Chan’s (2009) study on retrieval-induced forgetting. This does not come as a

surprise, given that mainstream memory literature is absolutely unfamiliar with the details of the von Restorff’s studies.

GESTALT MEMORY 18

within a given, ordinary day, turns into von Restorff’s nine homogenous items which, with each next

week, build on top of each other and thus become less and less memorable as they melt into each other

into a single “ground” memory. A similar phenomenon can be observed during long stays in prisons or

hospitals14. Each day is just like the other and like this, with every next day time flows, or rather, steals

itself away from one’s precious life.

For a long time, von Restorff’s important finding was referred to as the “isolation effect”. But

from MacLeod’s 2020 article we understand that in the 1950s, a scientist from the UK referred to it as the

“von Restorff effect”, which later on became its official name. As also stated by MacLeod, this effect

turned out to be one of those few robust effects that passed the test of time. And because of this, it

deserves to be understood and covered as a Gestalt effect as its entire experimental and conceptual

framing is theory-driven. Once more, it is a big disappointment that in the mainstream Anglophone

world of psychology this effect goes often unmentioned or when it is mentioned, it is referred to as “some

curious finding” and misrepresented as “people will remember well a strange word in a middle of a list”,

which completely misses the main point.

2.5.2 The change dynamics of perceptual Gestalts and memory Gestalts

When discussing her findings, von Restorff compares perceptual Gestalts and Gestalts emerging

from memory traces. She remarks that dynamic changes in perception are more of the kind seen, say, in

visual illusions or ambiguous figures. What she means here are figures like the Müller-Lyer illusion, the

duck-rabbit illusion (Figure 2) or Penrose’s impossible figures (Figure 3), in which the emerging holistic

percept is “distorted” (e.g., Müller-Lyer illusion) or unstable (e.g., ambiguous figures, Penrose impossible

figures) due to the way specific parts are configured. She emphasizes that such cases are an exception

rather than a rule in perception.

14 A beautiful narration of this loss of a sense of time can be found, for instance, in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The

Magic Mountain) novel. For a way delayed scientific treatise of this phenomenon, see Draaisma’s 2004 Why Life Speeds Up

As You Get Older book.

GESTALT MEMORY 19

Figure 2 (Wiki commons) Figure 3 (Hochberg, 2003)

In contrast, such changes and “distortions”, she remarks, are a rule rather than an exception when

it comes to memory. She draws attention to the fact that forgetting mechanisms such as retroactive and

proactive interference/inhibition effects are common for “ground” elements, but not for “figure”

elements, where such effects do not seem to occur at all. Even today, almost all mainstream memory

books and chapters refer to interference/inhibition effects as general forgetting mechanisms that apply

(more or less) to all kinds of items.15 Yet, in a different set of experiments in her dissertation, von

Restorff had shown that this was not the case. This important distinction between kinds of items is still

completely overlooked by mainstream psychology which for decades (and still) prefers to use simple,

isolated, random materials. Hence, by constantly using the same type of items that lack any inner

coherence among themselves, findings of interference/inhibition between items have been replicated

again and again, leading to an illusion of having found an overarching principle. Certainly, exceptions

were carefully marked, such as “release from PI” (e.g., the case where proactive interference builds up as

long as items are from the same category, say, animals, and is “released” when there is a switch to a

different category of items, say, vegetables). For a Gestaltist such “releases” would be nothing else but

15 As much as from the 1970s on and particularly post-1980s, memory research started to talk about context effects (e.g.,

Johnson, Doll, Bransford, & Lapinski, 1974; Bower, Karlin, Dueck, 1975; Jonker, Seli, MacLeod, 2013), distinctiveness

effects (cf. Hunt, 2006, also see Hunt, 1995, for some discussion of what was largely misinterpreted in von Restorff’s

findings), focal/nonfocal cues in forgetting (Kliegel, Jäger, Phillips, 2008), what has been lacking is a single, coherent

understanding behind those multiple lines of mainly disconnected research. Mostly, such effects are explained based on

attention (the “joker card” to use Koffka’s words). Attention is something that occurs at a given moment due to some salience

(or, say, interest, as in the case of endogenous attention). Yet, if we look at von Restorff’s findings, for instance, the saliency

of an item emerges afterwards, in the larger context, not at that instant moment, as required by attentional processes. This, I

believe, is an important difference.

GESTALT MEMORY 20

an isolation effect occurring right at the transition point as that item would assume figure quality (and

later on lose it as the next set of disconnected same-type items within the new category would continue

building up with no inner structure other than being disconnected members of a given category, e.g.,

vegetables).

Von Restorff also stresses that we should not a simply look at how much has been remembered

but also what has been remembered and what has been falsely remembered. Because only then can we

understand the change dynamics that memory traces undergo in between encoding and retrieval. Hence, I

would like to finish this section with a report of an interesting false memory I experienced lately and a

possible Gestalt-based analysis of it. In spring 2020, Dr. Rabia Ergin’s COGS 579 seminar course was

hosting a series of cognitive science talks as part of our Cognitive Science Master’s Program, here at

Boğaziçi University. In one of the weeks (Feb. 26), there was a talk on contour mechanisms in the early

visual cortex and their role in shape perception, and a week later (March 6), a talk on symmetry

perception and percept completions and how these can be understood via an analysis of frequency

tagging EEG signals. Many months later, when I wanted to recall the talks (without looking at the

seminar program list) I was perplexed to see that what I remembered as a single talk were actually two

distinct talks by two different persons. One of the presenters (Dr. Funda Yıldırım from Yeditepe

University) was someone I knew from the field. And what my mind did here, was to merge the two

events into a single event and pick her as the single speaker, i.e., the “figure”. When I googled the second

presenter (Dr. Nihan Alp from Sabancı University) I first felt a very low sense of familiarity but when

continuing to look at her picture, I slowly started to remember her, and even voice and style of talking. I

believe the reason why these two distinct events were merged into a single event were the overlaps that

both events shared (thus, a consequence of the Gestalt principle of sameness, often known as the

principle of similarity). Firstly, physically speaking both speakers looked somewhat similar to me and

secondly, both talks had a relation to Gestalt theory, hence there was a certain similarity also in content.

As a result, it seems that after some while, (1) my mind merged the two events into a single event instead

GESTALT MEMORY 21

of retaining them as two separate episodes, and (2) once the two episodes were reduced to one episode,

the two speakers had to reduce to one speaker, and my mind, naturally, “chose” the speaker with who I

had some earlier acquaintance. If the two speakers had been very different from each other physically

(say one, a young female researcher and the other an older, bearded male researcher) or if the two talks

had been as exciting yet very distinct talks (say one on visual perception, the other on children’s sign

language), it is likely that my mind would have retained the February 26 and the March 6, 2020 talks as

two separate episodes, that is as two unique memory Gestalts. I believe that memory research should

show more effort in addressing such more complicated yet more “real life” events in order to understand

memory in all its complexities. Even if such an endeavor may appear frightening at first sight, Gestalt

theory would, I believe, be a good guide as to how to address these phenomena experimentally. This is

exactly what Hedwig von Restorff did way back in 1933 as a young PhD student, and moreover, as a

young woman in a men’s world of science…

2.6 Learning and remembering: Friedrich Wulf’s 1922 study and dynamic memory trace theory

Koffka presents a study by Wulf to exemplify the dynamic character of memory traces.

Empiristic theories suggest that memory traces, that is, “engrams” can only change in the form of

becoming weaker either due to the mere passage of time or due to interference mechanisms.16 Gestalt

theory objects to this unidirectional, linear-minded perspective and proposes instead that in some cases,

with the mere passage of time, the engram may become even more singular, more “prägnant”, in other

words, stronger rather than weaker, and that this cannot be simply explained away with a simple “they

paid more attention” kind of explanation. In one of Wulf’s studies, participants were presented a set of

drawings (e.g. left stimuli in Figure 4) each of which they had to study for a couple of seconds. After

each stimulus they were asked to re-draw them after a time between 30 seconds to one week.17 Two

16 Donald Hebb and Karl Lashley referred to Gestalt theory’s proposal of dynamic memory traces as its most “unacceptable”

proposal. Koffka makes reference to this harsh objection and implies at several places that this upfront rejection by Hebb and

Lashley is doomed to succumb in the time to come. 17 We see that Wulf’s study precedes Bartlett’ın 1932 studies by 10 years. Moreover, Wulf’s research displays relatively

meticulous experimentation (e.g., he pilots a large set of shapes and also different retention intervals to see which ones are

GESTALT MEMORY 22

types of cases were observed: The general Gestalt of a given stimulus was either recognizable albeit with

a few changes or it completely vanished and was replaced by a different shape (and here it was noted that

participants would say that they were not sure about the shape they drew). In the cases where the general

shape was retained during recall, an additional analysis was performed on the kind of transformations that

occurred. Here, two main tendencies were observed. In one, a given feature of the drawing was drawn in

a more pronounced way, this he called ‘sharpening’ (in German “Präzisierung”, e.g., right drawing of

Stimulus 1 in Figure 4, with a more edgy, narrow, hence pronounced zigzagging). In the other, just the

opposite happened, which he called ‘leveling’, i.e., a given feature became less pronounced at test (in

German “Nivellierung”, e.g., right drawing of Stimulus 2 in Figure 4, where the concavity was slightly

subdued at recall).

Figure 4 (Stimulus 1 and 2 from Wulf, 1922; the two on the left are the stimuli that were presented, those on the right are examples of their

reproductions)

Wulf remarks that the sharpening of a memory trace cannot be sufficiently explained by a heightened

attention during perception and accuses empirists of using attention as a fill-in concept whenever needed.

Instead, he proposes that Prägnanz dynamics are at play rather than some laws of sensation, association

or attention. Likewise, he sees the leveling of a stimulus at recall again as a Gestalt dynamic rather than

the “wearing off” as observed in cobble stones as they “grow older”. Wulf also scrutinizes the dynamics

of different repetitive instances of recall at different time periods. First and foremost, he notices that

more appropriate for the purpose of the study). He also came up with rather creative methods of testing. He would, for

instance, construct a cued recall version for his studies where participants would receive a cue to help them recall the shape

with the instruction that they were also free to revise the cue itself once they thought they remembered the target drawing.

GESTALT MEMORY 23

immediately at the first instance of recall there are already some changes, and that exact replication is

rare. He then goes on to look at what happens at later stages when at first a given drawing is recalled

with a sharpening versus a leveling. He remarks that if leveling had been something like a fading away

of a memory trace, as suggested by empirists, one would expect that once leveling is seen, the image

would stage by stage become less and less clear. This, however, was not the case. Instead, the leveled

images continued to be recalled throughout long retention intervals. Wulf notes that be it in the direction

of sharpening or leveling, what is happening is a Prägnanz dynamic where less stable forms resolve into

more stable, singular forms. While in perceptual processes the degrees of freedom for Prägnanz

dynamics is restricted due to the fact that the object is “out there” in physical space, this is not the case

for memory, which enjoys considerably more degrees of freedom for the transformation of the engram.

Wulf furthermore emphasizes that such changes do not have to be related to language-mediated or other

top-down processes but that they may as well occur through a bottom-up process of perception and

memory formation, something that is utterly ignored by empirists.

Koffka allocates a considerable number of pages to Wulf’s 1922 study as it reveals the trademark

features of Gestalt theory. In his work, Wulf tries to understand which possible mechanisms could be at

work as well as what kind of meaning impositions seem to occur for each participant. This is why he not

only collects and categorizes the recalled versions of the drawings but asks every participant about their

experience, their phenomenal perception and their thoughts and ideas about the process. Hence, with this

qualitative data, instead of reverting to a cold, mechanistic perspective, he instead handles the material

with all its richness and complexity as it varies from person to person. The resulting picture, when taking

all findings into consideration, does not support empiristic expectations of “that which is more familiar

will be recalled the way it is more familiar to the participant” but instead hints to the recalled image being

determined by a resolution into a more stable version of the original drawing. In Figure 5a, for instance,

GESTALT MEMORY 24

given that each participant would have been very familiar with a similar shape of a cradle18 it was not

recalled as such but instead could turn into something as depicted in Figure 5b. The participant who drew

Figure 5b reported that he had coded 5a as “columns with arc”. What is critical here is not to get stuck

between an either-or ultimatum of whether a falsely recalled drawing occurred strictly due to past

experience kind of top-down processes or strictly due to the inner dynamics of the stimulus. Instead,

what Gestaltists propose is that all possible factors need to be considered, not just one of them.

Figure 5 (Koffka, 1936; “a” is what is presented, “b” is its recalled version)

Koffka emphasizes that Wulf’s repeated reproduction findings show that memory traces are

dynamic not static. As mentioned earlier, the proposal that engrams are dynamic forms was received

rather harshly by Donald Hebb and Karl Lashley. Today, however, many findings in cognitive

psychology (e.g., the “post-event misinformation effect”) similarly point to the fact that memories can

change. The main difference here, though, is that according to Gestalt theory, such changes do not

necessarily require external manipulations (such as providing misinformation before testing) but that

change is a natural property of memory traces which can happen as a result of figure-ground dynamics,

Gestalt principles of grouping and Prägnanz dynamics. This is an important difference and it seems that

the American empirist school’s resistance is directly against the “radicalness” of this proposition. 19

18 We must not forget that these similarities are bound by their era. Today, the same image might rather transform into a more

straightened up smiley. 19 As much as particularly with Loftus (1975), we see a plethora of studies in eyewitness research, false memory (Roediger &

McDermott, 1995) and autobiographical memory (e.g., Platt, Lacey, Iobst, & Finkelman, 1998; Bahrick, 2014) that look into

memory distortions, most of these use clear manipulations to bring about these changes. In cases where changes are observed

as is (e.g., in autobiographical memory studies), the proposed mechanism is again a kind of “joker card” of top-down

processing. Gestalt theory, in contrast, proposes additional mechanisms of change that are brought about not necessarily via

top-down processes but via figure-ground, grouping, and most important, Prägnanz dynamics. These mechanisms are

explained in more detail under the Erich Goldmeier section of this article. One could even say that Gestalt theory “dislikes” to

artificially separate bottom-up from top-down, and likewise, the environmental from the phenomenal, as all these exist jointly

and create their effects jointly.

GESTALT MEMORY 25

2.7 Does incessant repeating lead to learning?

After posing the question as to whether intense repetition is sufficient for learning, Koffka refers

to Kurt Lewin’s interesting 1922 study. In this study, Lewin asked participants to read a list of nonsense

syllables out aloud 300 times. In one condition, participants were told right from start about a subsequent

memory test. In the other condition, they were not informed about a memory test to come. Compared to

the first groups the second group performed miserably. This study was to show that, unlike the claims of

empirists, mere repetition was not enough to ensure learning. Interestingly, this study is reminiscent of

Nickerson and Adams’ 1979 study, so we are talking of yet another study that sadly has gone unnoticed

only to be “re-invented” five decades later. In the Nickerson and Adams study, participants were asked

to draw or recognize from among multiple options the American 1 penny. Almost none of the

participants could correctly draw or recognize the penny. This study showed that mere repetition, in this

case, frequent exposure, was not enough for learning to occur. All articles and textbooks present this

finding as if it was first discovered by Nickerson and Adams whereas Lewin tested the same thing in a

much more sophisticated, controlled way as attention was also ensured in the incidental setup by having

participants read the material aloud.

On the other hand, if we take learning as a process we do observe the beneficial effects of repetition,

says Koffka. Here he points to images that though chaotic at first sight, become organized over time,

sometimes with repeated or extended exposure (cf. emerging images, e.g., Figure 6 and Figure 7; Koffka

presents Figure 8 as an example, yet, that figure would no longer be perceived as chaotic, not even at first

sight20). The question he asks is whether we might start seeing learning effects as we present these in

different orderings. This is a question that can be tested, for instance, by comparing detection times of the

first half of stimuli to the last half per list and per participant and see whether across participants,

performance consistently improved in the second halves. Again many control variables could be thought

20 This change in itself is rather interesting. During the times that Koffka wrote his book, comic books, animations, above all

avant-garde versions of them were not that widespread. Possibly, quickly understanding the strangest drawings may be

acultural learning (cf. Cohn & Magliano, 2020).

GESTALT MEMORY 26

of. Figures 6 and 7 are, for instance, very different types of emerging images. Whereas in Figure 6, there

is a plethora of different-sized black-and-white spots, Figure 7 is less fragmented with fewer and larger-

size black-and-white spots. Moreover, Figure 7 is strongly implying information about light falling from

top whereas in Figure 6, no such suggestive information seems to exist. So one could have two lists, one

that has images of the kind seen in Figure 6 and the other with images of the kind seen in Figure 7, and

compare whether learning rates were comparable. In Gestalt terms, this learning would be a learning of

some kind of abstracted patterns which would likely be different across the two lists. And would it not be

interesting to start understanding what that generalized, holistic pattern perception could be, if that is the

case, of course.

Figure 6 (‘The Dalmatian’ by R. C. James) Figure 7 (Rock, 1984, ‘Person Sitting on Bench”)

Figure 8 (Koffka, 1936; ‘Man with Pince-Nez”)

Koffka goes on to report about an experience that appears to be widespread but hard to explain, i.e.,

the experience of no longer being able to recall a building that was there for ages but was then torn down

GESTALT MEMORY 27

and replaced by a new building. Here he asks why we become utterly incapable of retrieving the earlier

building which we looked at and even spent time in. This is something we experience quite frequently in

the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul. There have been buildings we had looked at zillions of times, have read

their name plates, inspected their showcases. One day, the shop is vacated and a new shop is opened in its

place and very shortly thereafter we are perplexed to notice that we can no longer remember what was in

its place before. Koffka remarks that the replacement of something by a full-fledged other thing, a full

Gestalt might be responsible for this almost shocking erasure. Such an interesting idea could be tested

using a retroactive inhibition (RI) setup. In this setup, where a List 2 would serve to inhibit an earlier

studied List 1, one could have two versions of a List 2. In one version, it would be a full-fledged list

comparable to the first list. The other version would have exactly the same items as the first version but a

less complete, less stable rendering of them (e.g., something like the gaps we might have in low-quality

photocopies where the identity of each word is nonetheless preserved; or, using letters instead of words as

in Figure 9 so as to further control for top-down “fill-in” effects). One could then compare whether the

amount of RI in the second condition would be less than in the normal condition. One strength of Gestalt

theory, I believe, is the power it has in creating experimental ideas thanks to the guidance it provides as a

full-fledged theory.

Figure 9 (From: Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1968)

Koffka remarks that when one talks of repetition, it is of critical importance whether one refers to

the repetition of an outcome for a given behavior or a repetition of a process. He states that the

empiristic view always and only focuses on the outcomes while ignoring the much more important

process component of learning. As an example, he refers to the famous Tolman and Honzik (1930) study.

GESTALT MEMORY 28

Tolman and Honzik’s latent learning study used a maze learning setup, as was common for the

Behaviorist school of the time. Rats were randomly divided into three groups. The first group of rats

was rewarded with food every time they reached the exit of the maze (“constantly rewarded group”-

HR/hungry reward). The second group was never rewarded (“constantly unrewarded group”-

HNR/hungry nonreward). The critical group was the third group of rats who were not rewarded till Day

11 when they unexpectedly were rewarded once they reached the exit of the maze (“group rewarded

starting from Day 11” – HNR-R/hungry nonreward-reward). The original findings are presented in

Figure 10.

Figure 10 (From: Tolman & Honzik, 1930)

The first group of rats made fewer and fewer error turns as they were rewarded every single time they

reached the exit. This was a finding that was expected by the empiristically minded Behaviorist school.

In contrast, rats in the second group, who never received an extra reward when reaching the exit, showed

some though minimal decrease in errors (likely due to the fact that finding the exit was a certain kind of

reward as the trial would come to an end and the animal would be free to go). The real surprise came

GESTALT MEMORY 29

with the third group. These rats behaved just as the rats in the second group. However, when rewarded

on Day 11, their behavior on Day 12 was astonishing. Rather than showing a learning slope that was

similar to that of rats in the first group, their decrease in errors was vastly accelerated, showing that they

had learned the maze layout during their eleven days of strolling around. Tolman and Honzik were

furthermore surprised to see that rats in the third group made even fewer errors than rats in the first group

despite the fact that the latter had constantly been rewarded every single time over those eleven days.

This study has come to be one of the most important studies to disprove the mechanistic account of the

Behaviorist school which claimed that any learning was dependent on rewards, i.e., that without rewards

no learning would ever take place. While discussing Tolman and Honzik’s latent learning study, Koffka

remarks that the eleven days of free exploration allowed the rats to construct a map of the layout. Hence

we would also expect rats in the second group to have learned a lot more even if they were not showing it

because there was no incentive to do so. Koffka used indeed the term “map” in quotation marks in his

1936 book, which was a big taboo in the times of Behaviorism. This very term would reappear years later

in Tolman’s 1948 article called Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men.21

There was yet another critical finding, which Tolman and Honzik note in the discussion section.

Given that the third group seemed to have learned the maze even better than the first group, they conclude

that latent learning might indeed have been even more effective than overt learning. This sentence seemed

to have gone unnoticed throughout all of mainstream psychology. Instead, the study is often portrayed to

show that rats in the third group simply “catch up” with the first group, ignoring the fact that they actually

outperform the all-time rewarded rats. Sometimes there is reference to this surprising “strange” finding

only to be dismissed as to have been caused by the third group of rats “being more motivated”. How

strange that no one cared to run follow up studies to see whether this was simply a difference in motivation

21 Even though Tolman never considered himself a Gestaltist, he did meet Kurt Koffka in the 1910s when he visited Germany

to improve his German while he was a PhD student amongst Behaviorists at Harvard. That was just about the time when the

Gestalt School was slowly taking over the current empirist structuralist (mostly stationed in Germany) and behaviorist (mostly

stationed in the US) climate. Years later in 1935, Tolman joined a meeting by Kurt Lewin, who had settled in the US in 1933

and founded the Topology Society. There even is a picture of him, Lewin and Koffka (cf. Goodwin, 2005)

GESTALT MEMORY 30

or whether, as courageously alluded by Tolman and Honzik, the rats in the third group did indeed form –

to use Koffka’s term- a much better map of the layout. Could it be that the third group of rats had the

freedom of exploring the various alleys with no urge to reach the exit as fast as possible? On the other

hand, could it be that when constantly rewarded, the animal’s learning became narrowed to the “safest,

least risky exit route” which might have missed much better short-cuts available? Hence, as a result, while

rats in the first group simply memorized a certain path without exploring the different alleys and corners

of the maze, could it be that the unrewarded rats explored every single corner which then allowed them to

reach the exit with much fewer errors? In other words, could it be that while rats in the first group were

made to learn simply by rote, S-R association, the ones in the second and third group were latently learning

a holistic map? With today’s knowledge of place and grid cells (O’Keefe & Dostrovsky, 1971, Hafting,

Fyhn, Molden, Moser, & Moser, 2005) and possibilities of much more sophisticated behavioral and

neuroimaging recording this should not be too impossible to investigate.

Tolman and Honzik’s study should have made a breakthrough, yet it did no more than come in

handy for the so-called “cognitive revolution”, which I think, sadly missed what it could have achieved if

it had better understood the conceptualizations of Gestalt theory (cf. Mungan, 2020/2021). The cognitive

revolution, in that sense, might not really be a revolution because it did not bring about a radical change in

perspective (despite the efforts of a very few, e.g., Neisser, 1976, also cf. Bruner, 1990). After all, the

empirist’s mindset of believing that an understanding of the whole can be reached by summing up isolated

“parts information” was tenaciously retained.22

22 Therefore, it is of no wonder that both in my country and in the world, educational systems are still almost blindly following

a system of reward and punishment, giving scores for every single thing a student does, rewarding GPAs and hence inflating

them, unaware of, or, oblivious of (or indifferent to?) the fact that humans (even rats!) can learn without that and might even

learn much more when not imprisoned in a “Skinner box”. Worse still, today in this “Skinner box” of life, we are made to race

against each other in fierce and ruthless competition at the expense of enjoying the process of open, explorative learning.

GESTALT MEMORY 31

2.8 First demonstrations of implicit memory: Claparède 1911, Maccurdy 1928

Unlike in the time of old school empirists who excluded meaning and only focused on mechanisms,

and preferably the simplest possible mechanism, in the 1950s with the “cognitive revolution”, concepts

like meaning and context came back. Yet, it was as late as the 1980s that implicit memory became part of

mainstream scientific research (e.g. Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980) and a subject of careful investigation

(e.g., Hashtroudi, Ferguson, Rappold, & Chrosniak, 1989). Meanwhile, way back in the 1910s and 20s

there were already very intriguing observations and analyses of implicit memory. In his book, Koffka

draws attention to Claparède’s 1911 monograph where he reports about an advanced Korsakoff syndrome

patient who would perform miserably on various kinds of memory tests and would never recognize the

nurse who took care of him for the past 6 months but who would have no problems finding his way within

the hospital. In the same memory chapter (and there are a total of four memory chapters in the book!) we

see a little study by Maccurdy who, inspired by Claparède’s work, presents one of his severely amnesic

patients his own name and address and asks the patient to repeat it back. The patient is unable to do so.

He would thereupon present the patient a list of various names and last names, as well as street names and

numbers and have the patient guess what Maccurdy’s name and address were. The patient would do so

almost perfectly. Yet, Maccurdy notes that this memory was a memory without an owner, without feelings,

without a “me-ness”, as Claparède would call it.23

3. Erich Goldmeier’s Studies

In this section I will discuss Erich Goldmeier’s The Memory Trace: Its Formation and Its Fate book

from 1982, published seven years before his death. Even the book’s title, reminiscent of a Borges story, is

rather daring for any mainstream memory researcher. Yet, in this book, Goldmeier attempts a very

meticulous analysis of changes in memory traces during their storage period.

23 In 1968, Zajonc used a very similar method in his famous mere exposure effect study.

GESTALT MEMORY 32

The book starts with the criticism that almost all research on memory was overly focused on

verbal memory. Yet, the human brain obviously did not evolve to store endless, disconnected words and

syllables, and certainly their nonsensical versions neither. He remarks that we should therefore not be

surprised by Shepard’s 1967 findings, which showed that participants were able to correctly recognize

600 studied pictures from among 1200 pictures with 98% accuracy24, as they were stimuli with unified,

inherent, rich meaning. He then goes on to talk about the studies by memory researchers such as Tulving,

Craik and Lockhart, and remarks that their focus always seemed to be the stimulus list, the processing

tasks participants were asked to do during encoding, and finally their memory performances at test. Yet,

this, to Goldmeier, is insufficient as it ignores the most critical phase, i.e., the dynamics of what happens

to the encoded material during the time between study and test. Those dynamics, Goldmeier states, are

driven not only by how the person interacted with the material during encoding but also by the inherent,

structural, “whole” characteristics of the stimuli. And it is this very aspect that he examines throughout

his book, looking at visual stimuli but also texts and symbols as they are studied and retrieved across

various experimental setups.

To facilitate the reading process, before moving on to the different sections of the book, I will first

summarize the main tenets of Goldmeier’s Stress Theory, which might be called an elaboration of Wulf’s

Dynamic Trace Theory.

1. The changeability of memory traces depends on their singularity/Prägnanz, hence on their stability.

Patterns that are regular, that is, patterns that have a stable organization, form “strong wholes” that

carry singularity (Goldmeier, 1982, pp. 63-64). Memory traces of such patterns will have close to

zero chance of changing (e.g., Figure 11a). The second type of patterns are those that are almost

singular (near-singularity). Those he describes as a “stable organization except for minor

perturbations” (pp. 64). For those patterns we might expect a change towards singularity. In case of

24 The stimuli were colored pictures. A 2-choice recognition test after 2 hours of delay led to close to 100% correct responses,

after 3 days to 92%, and after one week still to 87% correct responses.

GESTALT MEMORY 33

Figure 11b, it could be a change where the lower right dot might vanish and hence be no longer

recalled at test. And finally, there are patterns that are nonsingular, i.e., patterns where parts do not

have meaningful interrelations but instead are randomly configured, just as envisioned by the

empirists. Figure 11c would be an example for that. Such patterns are expected to fade during storage

in random, hard-to-predict ways. At test, Goldmeier, remarks, it is possible that a person’s mind

might construct something of the remaining meaningless pieces just to produce an output, or, earlier

schemata may “come to help” to reconstruct something more meaningful from the randomly faded

residues. It is the latter that the empirists have been showing again and again, believing that such a

fading and reconstruction-via-schemata process is the general process to explain memory failures.

Figure 11a-c (Goldmeier, 1982)

2. The singularity of the memory trace is dependent on the phenomenal perception of the physical

properties of a given stimulus. For instance, Figure 11a may not carry singularity for people from a

non-Western culture, hence, it may instead be a near-singular pattern that, say, would turn into a 4-dot

square with the dot in the middle removed, as the square might be a singular, stable form in that

culture but not its 5-dot “dice” version. Whereas in Gestalt theory, properties like symmetry and

regularity are proposed to enhance the singular character of physical stimuli, it also emphasizes that

their counterparts in phenomenal perception (as surely influenced by culture) are as important.25

3. The trademark of phenomenal singularity is the instant detection of a small deviation that breaks it,

i.e., its well-structured, stable, “good form”. For instance, a deviation is instantly detected in Figures

25 As an example, we might think of distinctiveness as a more phenomenal than physical property. In von Restorff’s studies, it

is the context which determines whether a given stimulus has figure or ground quality.

GESTALT MEMORY 34

12b and 13b compared to the standard presented in Figures 12a and 13a (say in a recognition test)

because it violates the stable parallel line structure of 12a, and straight line structure in 13a. On the

other hand, the change in Figures 12c or 13c may go undetected because it only changes the angle

without destroying the parallel line or straight line structure in 12a and 13a.

Figure 12a-c (Goldmeier, 1982)

Figure 13a-c (The lines were reconstructed by the author based on Goldmeier’s verbal descriptions in his 1942 book. In Fig. 13b, the

“straight line” Gestalt of Fig. 13a is slightly deviated by an approximate 10-degree deviation on its upper part; on the other hand, in

Fig. 13c, the straight line in 12a is rotated as a whole clockwise by approx. 10 degrees without breaking the “straight line” Gestalt.)26

4. Stimuli that have singularity (e.g. Figure 14a) are encoded with the least effort and form memory

traces that are the most resilient to time and interference. Near-singular stimuli (e.g., Figure 14b), in

turn, lead to predictable memory trace changes (e.g., Fig. 14b turning into Fig. 14a), and once they

resolve into a more stable, singular version, they become resilient to time and interference. In

contrast, in the case of nonsingular stimuli (e.g., take Figure 14b and change it into a completely

irregular, chaotic version of it with randomly long spikes that lack an overarching “good continuity”

contour on top), we cannot predict the kind of change in the memory trace as that change will be a

random change.

26 Note that the angle values are only roughly represented.

GESTALT MEMORY 35

Figure 14a and 14b (Goldmeier, 1982)

According to Goldmeier, singularity means least complexity. Hence, if we take Figure 15a, its

likely phenomenal perception will not be a grouping as depicted in Figure 15c but one as in Figure

15b since that one, phenomenally, is the simpler and, in terms of durability, the more “economic”

one.27

Figure 15a-c (Goldmeier, 1982; red circles added by the author)

Goldmeier further remarks that while the possible ways of grouping are rather restricted in singular

patterns, just the opposite applies to nonsingular patterns. In the latter, there are multiple ways with none

of them being the inevitable or even the dominant one. As an example, unlike Figure 16a, Figures 16b

and 16c are nonsingular, hard to differentiate, and as such are ground-like rather the figure-like, are

complex, and unsuggestive of any naturally emerging, stable kind of grouping.

27 Here Goldmeier refers to Hochberg & Attneave’s attempt to quantify Gestalt theory’s “singularity” concept from an

information processing theory (cf. Shannon,1948) as indexed by predictability.

GESTALT MEMORY 36

Figure 16a-c (Goldmeier, 1982)

3.1 What is “same”: The mathematical vs. the phenomenal same

Goldmeier mentions that what is considered to be the same (or similar) in mathematical terms

does not necessarily match with what is considered to be the same (or similar) in psychological terms. As

an example he shows Figure 17a and remarks that while its mathematically enlarged (hence same)

version (i.e., where all proportions are strictly retained) is Figure 17b, for the perceiving person it is

rather 17c than 17b that most resembles 17a.

Figure 17a-c (Goldmeier, 1982)

GESTALT MEMORY 37

Likewise, for the perceiving person it is Figure 18b that better mimics the pattern of Figure 18a rather

than its mathematically exact stretched version in Figure 18c.

Figure 18a-c (Goldmeier, 1982)

Hence, in any memory study, the researcher has to consider phenomenal rather than mathematical

similarity when planning which stimuli to match with which. This is particularly important if, aside from

recall tests, the researcher plans to use recognition tests that require the generation of lure items.

Goldmeier presents examples of similarity ratings provided by participants for different patterns and their

variants, and notes that the ratings could not be predicted based on systematic, mathematical

transformations of sameness. Hence, he warns that relying on mathematical assumptions regarding

sameness judgments will be insufficient and even lead to misleading results.

3.2 What is singularity?

Goldmeier stresses that memory studies have to be as meticulous in their construction of stimuli

as perception studies. After all, memory traces are often transformations of that which is perceived in

physical space. Hence, it is of utmost importance to analyze the singularity qualities and the resulting

stability of those traces, particularly so if it is indeed the case that they may go through transformations as

they rest in memory.

GESTALT MEMORY 38

Just like the three states of matter, Goldmeier proceeds to list the three states of memory traces:

(1) singular ones, (2) near-singular ones, and (3) nonsingular ones. Singular memory traces will show

minimal change and display high resolution. Here he adds Bear’s 1973 definition of “a good shape is a

shape where each of its parts strongly suggest each of its other parts”. Figures 11a, 12a, …, 16a, 17a are

examples of singular images likely to stay unchanged as memory traces. Yet another example would be

Figure 19a. In a memory experiment one would expect the recall of Figure 19a to be more stable and

accurate compared to the recall of Figure 19b, despite the fact that Figure 19b is not at all that complex

with its four straight lines and two instead of one angles.

Goldmeier also objects to the empirists’ “schema” proposal to explain the memory advantage for

Figure 19a. Throughout the book, Goldmeier juxtaposes his stress theory with the empiristic fading-plus-

reconstruction model. According to the empirists’ view, any fading memory trace will get activated via a

resemblance to a schema and reconstructed accordingly. This change can happen through some

manipulation during encoding (cf. Carmichael, Hogan, & Walter, 1932) or with or without a probe during

retrieval. Yet, according to Goldmeier, this perspective completely ignores the change dynamics of the

stimuli’s phenomenal and intrinsic characteristics. Moreover, it also cannot easily explain singularity

effects with less familiar stimuli. The stimulus in Figure 20a, for instance, though less schematic

compared to the one in Figure 19a, will nonetheless display much more stable reproductions compared to

Figure 20b. If one claims that people might have used a schema for the recall of Figure 20a, then one

would expect the same schema to be used in the recall of Figure 20b. Yet, while Figure 20a shows stable

reproductions this is not the case for Figure 20b. In other words, as much as schemata may play a role, it

is also the regularity or irregularity of a stimuli’s inner structure which will affect to what extent it will be

remembered accurately and over long retention intervals.

GESTALT MEMORY 39

Figure 19ab (Goldmeier, 1982)

Figure 20ab (Goldmeier, 1982)

In a different section, Goldmeier dwells on the possible sources, hence kinds, of singularity. One

of them he defines as physiological singularity, which is a singularity that results from our “hardware”. He

points to Eleanor Rosch’s 1971 research on category membership where she discovered, for instance, the

existence of focal as opposed to nonfocal colors. Rosch found that within each color category of the typical

rainbow colors, those that were focal (hence, of a given wavelength) were seen as clearer, rated as more

prototypical, hence more memorable compared to their neighboring versions within the same color

category. She found that this quality carried a universality that transcended culture, age and past learning

experience, likely due to specialized retinal receptor cells that responded best for that given wavelength.

Using Gestalt terminology, Goldmeier identifies this as an enhanced memorability caused by a singularity

that is brought about by our unique physiological constitution.

As a second kind of singularity, Goldmeier proposes the one that results from imprinting, as

observed in birds and mammals. A newly born gosling, for instance, will imprint on her mother as soon as

she hatches, that is, she will instantaneously and for many months to come know her as her caretaker.

Likewise, for a newly born baby, the face, voice and smell of her mother, in whose womb she grew and

GESTALT MEMORY 40

whose milk she sucked will assume singularity almost instantaneously and for years to come. These, too,

are instances of very stable, insistent knowledge type memories.

The third kind of singularity he describes as the one that gradually evolves through learning. As an

example, he mentions the singularities a radiologist perceives in tomography scans or the unique

configurations a chess expert perceives in a chess display. Just as the other Gestaltists, Goldmeier, too,

does not reject the phenomenal changes that occur in perception (and memory) via learning and experience.

And just as the other Gestaltists, his objection is to reduce everything to mere learning as proposed by

empiricism, as this disregards inherent structure of entities and instead takes the world of entities as equally

random where all knowledge acquisition solely occurs through repetitive association. Such a view would

likely not provide a satisfactory explanation for singularities, e.g., Rosch’s focal colors.

3.3 What is encoded?

So what is it that people encode as they process stimuli? Here, Goldmeier refers to Palmer’s 1975

study which showed that after studying holistic face drawings participants had a hard time recognizing

pieces of it when presented in isolation, torn away from their intrinsic roles within the whole (see Figure

21a and its parts presented separately as in Figure 21b). Goldmeier remarks that this shows that at least

in some cases we encode an instantaneous emergent whole (which makes its parts almost unrecognizable

when presented in isolation) rather than single pieces from which a full image is constructed. Palmer

likewise emphasizes that global processing inevitably weakens local processing. In other words, it seems

that the two types of processing are opponent processes where one or the other dominates over the other.

Figure 21a and 21b (Palmer, 1975; cited in Goldmeier, 1982)

GESTALT MEMORY 41

3.3.1 The difference between looking and seeing

Goldmeier refers to yet another study to address the question of what is encoded. It is a study by

Wiseman and Neisser (1974) where participants received black and white images of faces of varying

degrees of identifiability (Figures 22a-c). Their task was to try to detect a face in each of them. At the

end, they were given a surprise recognition memory task where they had to mark all the images they had

been presented. Findings were crystal clear: Images that could be identified as faces were recognized 1.5

times better than those that remained unidentified. Goldmeier interprets this as a difference in

singularity. Once a participant was able to identify a face, that is, a whole, meaningful, structured image

with inner coherence, it was now a singular pattern leading to a singular (hence stable) memory trace. In

contrast, the same image would remain as a meaningless chaos for those who did not see the coherent

face when looking at it. Hence the difference is one of looking versus seeing. Once the singular image

emerges we deal with a stable and possibly very long lasting memory trace. Wiseman and Neisser, too,

emphasize that what is important is not so much the stimulus itself but how it appears to the person, i.e.,

its phenomenal perception.

Figure 22a-c (Wiseman & Neisser, 1974; 21a is an easily identified face, i.e. identified by almost all participants, 21b is a moderately well

identified face, i.e., identified by approximately half of the participants, 21cis a hardly identified face, i.e., identified by “relatively few”28)

28 This expression is used by Wiseman and Neisser (1974) with no further detail.

GESTALT MEMORY 42

Goldmeier likewise discusses Blesser et al.’s (1973) handwriting stimuli (see Figure 23). These

different “A”s do not have a common geometrical structure. What a person learns and remembers when

learning to read, he says, is not so much geometrical structure but “the organization, the phenomenal

parts and phenomenal features” (p.76). What he probably means is that what allows us to identify

specific dynamics of the Gestalt principles of grouping such as good continuation, proximity, similarity

etc.

Figure 23 (Blesser et al., 1973; cited in Goldmeier, 1982)

3.3.2 Encoding the non-existent, not encoding the existent…

In addition to analyzing visual images, Goldmeier also gives examples from narratives, texts, and

symbols. For instance, when reading a text or listening to a story, things might get “added” just as the

subjective contours in visual images (see Figure 24a and 24b), thus leading to the encoding of something

that was not there.

Figure 24ab (Kanizsa, 1976)

GESTALT MEMORY 43

Let us think of a short narrative such as this: “The woman wearily went to the supermarket. She chose 1

kilo of oranges from the fruit aisle and put it in the shopping cart. After she bent down and placed an

orange on the floor back on the shelf, she went directly to the cash register, paid her bill and left the

market.”29 It is quite likely that participants, when asked to recall the story thereafter, particularly a few

hours later rather than immediately, will remember it as if they heard that the women herself dropped that

orange. Yet, there is no such mention in the narrative as to who dropped the orange or whether the

orange was laying on the floor all time through. But the almost reflexive inference that she dropped it

makes the narrative more coherent, more stable, in other words, singular.

As an example of not coding the existent, Goldmeier refers to a study by Britton, Meyer, Simpson

et al. (1979, as cited in Goldmeier, 1982). In this study, participants were given two different texts that

had one paragraph in common. Whereas in one text, that paragraph was made to be a more central,

figural component of the storyline, in the other text, it was made to be a more peripheral, ground-like

component.30 Findings showed that the very same paragraph was remembered well in the first case and

almost not at all in the latter case. In other words, what turned out to be critical was not the inherent

properties of the paragraph (say its own inner coherence) but its role in the larger, overarching whole.

Goldmeier then cites additional studies which show that as long as the macro structure (i.e., the main

storyline) is retained, microstructural features (i.e., parts, side narratives that do not affect the main

meaning if left out) are typically lost in story recalls. Goldmeier remarks that to explain this away as

being due to schematic, predictable, “ideal form” characteristics of the macro structure, as Mandler and

Johnson suggest, is not fully convincing. He presents Alice in Wonderland as an example where the main

storyline is absolutely far from being predictable and “ideal” but is still remembered very well.

According to Goldmeier, what is critical is not so much experience-based acquired schemata but rather

the singularity that emerges out of the inner coherence of a narrative.

29 This narrative was inspired by Hannigan and Reinitz’ (2001) study. 30 Goldmeier compares this latter version to Gottschaldt’s “embedded figures”, where a distinct part can become invisible once

embedded within a larger form.

GESTALT MEMORY 44

3.3.3 Processes that stabilize memory traces…

In his book, Goldmeier also cites Craik and Tulving’s famous 1975 levels-of-processing study. In

this study, participants were asked to engage in different processing tasks as they studied a list of words.

For some words they were asked to mark whether or not it was written in upper case; for some, whether

or not it rhymed with a sample item; for some, whether or not it belonged to a certain semantic category;

and for some, whether or not it was a possible fill-in for an incomplete sentence provided next to it. After

a while, participants were given a surprise memory test. Findings showed a very powerful levels-of-

processing effect: Words processed semantically (i.e., in terms of their meaning, as in the latter two

tasks) were remembered five times as much as those processed with the nonsemantic tasks (i.e., the letter

case and rhyme tasks). Yet there was another important finding, a curious finding that keeps replicating

in various other studies but is still not too well understood: Across all tasks, words which received

affirmative responses (regarding the processing questions) were significantly better remembered.31

Goldmeier states that for the “yes”-responded items, the words entered into a meaningful whole with the

context and as a result assumed singularity, something that was not possible for the “no”-responded

items. I believe that this a proposal worth considering and investigating.

3.3.4 Grouping, meaning-making, noticing and encoding a Gestalt

Goldmeier also scrutinizes our memory for symbols. Here he cites Katona’s 1940 study where

participants are presented with various 12-digit numbers (e.g., 581215192226) in different ways. One

group was asked to memorize each by reading it aloud in groupings of threes (“five hundred eighty-one,

two hundred fifteen, …”). The second group always first received a sentence fragment “The federal

expenditures in the last year amounted to $…….” and then the number which they again had to read out

loud as a monetary value (“five billion eight hundred one million ….”)32. Hence, in this group, the

number was embedded into a semantic context. The third group, on the other hand, was simply told to

31 This was so for both recognition and recall tests. Presenting items twice (not massed but spaced out) instead of once during

encoding even further enhanced the effect. 32 To make that possible, the 12-digit number was written like monetary values with a decimal point marker at the end,

581215922.26. This study was run in 1939 and Katona admits that this minute change does add a flaw to the study.

GESTALT MEMORY 45

memorize it. Right after that, when asked to write down the number, all groups showed more or less

equal performance. The only difference, Katona noted was that the third group was slower in retrieving

compared to the other two groups. However, when given a surprise memory test a week later, neither the

first group which had studied the sequence as triplets, nor the second group which studied it in a

meaningful context were successful. On the other hand, some of the participants of the third group

remembered the series flawlessly because it turned out that they managed to discover the rule behind the

series (adding, in alternation, a 3 and a 4 to each number to obtain the succeeding one) and it was that

rule which they remembered and hence applied during recall given they remembered the first number.

We may liken this to what happened in the difficult-to-identify black and white face illustrations in the

Wiseman and Neisser 1974 study. Those who detected the rule were like those who were able to discern

a face in the black and white patches. Likewise, those who did not detect the rule saw the 12-digit

number series as irregular, i.e. random, just as the participants who could not detect a face and hence only

saw “chaos” instead of a face. Just as in the Wiseman and Neisser study, those who saw order

outperformed those who did not. In Gestalt terms, the difference depended on whether participants were

able to discern a figure or were lost in just seeing something with no singular character, i.e., a ground.

In summary, encoding is selective and economical according to Goldmeier. It tries to code the

most important information with the least effort. Hence, says Goldmeier, you might forget what a person

was wearing, or whether they had glasses or not but you would for sure know that they were not naked.

After all, if they were naked, that would make them a “figure”, just as in the “von Restorff effect”,

whereas their outfit (if it did not relate to the conversation or was not something of value in your

phenomenal field of interest) would function as ground rather than figure and be hence encoded in low

resolution, as a “blurred” memory trace.

3.4 Phenomenal asymmetries in stimuli

In the last section of his book, Goldmeier talks about how different stimuli (e.g., images, numbers,

words, concepts) carry different degrees of stress (in the sense of field forces) depending on their

GESTALT MEMORY 46

singularity status. He remarks that it is these asymmetrical stress dynamics that will influence

phenomenal perception and hence bring about different memory dynamics. Eleanor Rosch, for instance,

found that when presenting participants focal and nonfocal colors, they would rate a purplish red as

similar to a focal red but not vice versa, i.e., a focal red would not be rated as similar to a purplish red.

Similarly, she found that the number “103” would often be coded as “close to 100” but the number “100”

would never be coded as “close to 103”. In other words, while nonfocal category members would

assimilate to the central, focal category member, a focal member would remain separate from its nearby

nonfocal members. As such, this should not simply be taken as some isolated, “interesting phenomenon”.

Instead, in a memory setup, we might expect that nonfocal category items would be more likely to be

misremembered as focal items, whereas focal ones would not be subject to such memory trace changes.

This is indeed what Rosch finds: a purplish red was often misremembered as red but a red was not

misremembered as purplish red; the number “103” was often misremembered as “100” but “100” was not

misremembered as “103” or even “101”. These asymmetries observed in both perception and memory

are interpreted by Goldmeier from a Gestalt conceptualization of “field forces”. Hence, be it a number

(“103”), a symbol (“~”), a concrete (“cupboard”) or an abstract (“agony”) word or a conceptual

terminology (“semi-presidential system”), if each has a more prominent, a more focal neighboring

number, symbol, word or conceptual terminology, they will likely turn into these in later recall (e.g., into

“100”, “”, “cabinet”, “pain”, “presidential system”..).33

3.5 The sine qua non of memory experiments

Goldmeier raises two main criticisms to mainstream memory research, (1) that the stimuli are

disconnected, random items, and (2) that the memory tests are mostly done after a short retention interval

33 Naturally, we would expect that the more complex and layered the item is, the more the field dynamics would vary from

person to person and even from one time to another in the same person. Hence, we would expect a casual number 103 in a

report to be later on remembered as “close to 100” or even “100” in most cases. In contrast, we would expect a terminology

such as “semi-presidential system” casually mentioned in some report, to be less predictable in terms of whether and how it

would change at later recall since this would more heavily be influenced by each person’s unique phenomenal world of

meanings.

GESTALT MEMORY 47

of ca. 15-20 minutes. Instead, according to Gestalt theory, if the goal is to do “ecologically valid”

studies, to use Neisser’s terminology, that is, to run studies that relate to real life, the stimuli have to be

meaningful (while a random item list should certainly be included but as a control list). In addition,

memory tests should include more real-life retention intervals that expand over days even weeks rather

than minutes. The basic experimental design of Goldmeier’s studies reported in his book is a 3 (stimuli:

singular, near-singular, nonsingular)within-ss x 2 (type of memory test: free recall and recognition)within-ss x

4 (retention interval: immediate, 2 weeks, 4 weeks, or 6 weeks)between-ss. All participants were exposed to

all three singularity types and their encoding periods were such as to allow for meaningful processing

(e.g., if the to-be-learned stimuli were visual images, participants were granted 25 seconds per image

during which they had to draw the figure twice on a piece of paper; that task would be presented as

measuring participants’ copying ability, with no mention of a subsequent memory test). After a given

time period, depending on their assigned retention interval, half of the participants were first given a free

recall test, then a recognition test, whereas half were first given a recognition test and afterwards a free

recall test. The first test always came as a surprise, hence, to keep conditions equal, only the data of the

first tests were analyzed.

3.6 Main findings of Goldmeier’s empirical studies

Regardless of whether the items were visual images, verbal materials, or symbols, Goldmeier’s

main findings were as follows.:

1. What was remembered was linked to the singularity characteristic of a given stimulus. Singular

stimuli were remembered with almost no transformation across all retention intervals. Near-singular

ones which were like singular ones except for an additional or missing feature were remembered by

deleting the extra or adding the missing; this tendency was more pronounced at longer retention

intervals.

2. In all stimulus materials (visual shapes, narratives, symbols) it was observed that there were some

GESTALT MEMORY 48

versions that would never appear as a possible transformation in free recall or be falsely chosen in a

recognition setting. Figure 25a, for instance, was never reproduced (not by any of 23 participants)

with the upper arc missing. Twenty participants reproduced the arc as it should be, i.e., with three

vaults, one participant with four vaults, one with two vaults, and one with a single vault. In contrast,

the lower straight line was kept in only 11 out of 23 participants (though not necessarily in horizontal

orientation, see Fig. 25b). Ten out of 23 participants completely dropped that line. As can be seen,

what is remembered or not in such nonrandom shapes is not at all arbitrary and also not necessarily

predicted by its familiarity (a straight horizontal line is probably one of the most singular shapes

around the world). It is the features that make a stimulus singular in its entirety that are resistant to

forgetting. In contrast, those that do not are easily forgotten.

Figure 25a-d (Goldmeier, 1982; Fig. 25a, target stimulus; 25b-c-d different recalled versions)

Along the same lines, in Figure 26, if the studied picture is 26h, it can be misrecognized as 26c or

26d, but never as 26e, 26f, or 26g. Goldmeier explains this in terms of the differences in phenomenal

stress caused by the gaps within (26h 26c and 26d) versus between (26h ≠ 26e, 26f, and 26g)

continuous lines.34 In contrast, if the studied image was the one in Figure 26e, no change was observed,

even after 6 weeks for delay. Similarly, Figure 27a was never misrecognized as Figure 27b because of its

34 Throughout his book, Goldmeier would compare his terminology with those of the empirists of his time, e.g., with

Tversky’s 1977 “saliency” term in his feature theory of similarity or likewise with Rosch’s prototype and schema concepts in

her feature theory of categorization. At places he would acknowledge that the same phenomena could be explained through

different concepts. Yet what I think is the most important is that none of the other paradigms can say as much on perception,

memory, productive thinking and possibly other domains in psychology as Gestalt theory with its overarching postulates of

prägnanz dynamics, transposibility, figure-ground segregation, and grouping (cf. Mungan, 2020/2021). Here we have a theory

that can explain a wide variety of phenomena in visual as well as auditory perception, in memory, in productive thinking and

possibly more. In contrast, most models, theories, phenomena within cognitive psychology do not even generalize across its

own domains but are mostly only applicable to a narrow range within a given domain, say memory, or perception, or thinking

(and even worse, sometimes not even across a given domain).

GESTALT MEMORY 49

unique inner coherence that nicely fits with the principle of good continuation, as proposed by

Wertheimer in his seminal 1923 paper, introducing the Gestalt principles of grouping/organization.

In one or two places, Goldmeier refers to Bartlett’s and Wulf’s earlier studies emphasizing that

these lacked a conceptual framework to explain their findings. Hence, even though both lines of research

revealed interesting findings they were doomed to remain descriptive.35

Figure 26 (Goldmeier, 1982)

Figure 27a and 27b (Goldmeier, 1982)

35 Goldmeier notes that what Bartlett observes in his The War of Ghosts study series is not so much a simple ‘assimilation into

cultural schemata’ mechanism but rather a tendency to transform things into a more coherent, singular narrative. After all, the

participants came all from a very homogeneous cultural and socio-economic background yet there were considerable

differences in their reproductions. Hence, a simple schematic assimilation explanation is insufficient.

GESTALT MEMORY 50

4. Finishing Remarks, In Place of a Conclusion

In this article, I presented the interesting yet little known conceptualizations of Gestalt theory on

memory. As I mentioned in the introduction, Gestalt theory’s proposal that memory traces can undergo

nonrandom changes as they rest in memory and without necessarily external manipulations (such as

misinformation in between study and test) is probably one of its most central ideas. Another critical

contribution is its ability to apply the figure-ground conceptualization of perception to memory in the

most ingenious way. According to Gestalt theory, other than the intrinsic figural stability (which

Goldmeier preferred to call “singularity”, and Wertheimer “Prägnanz”) of a stimulus, also its “figure”

identity that emerges from the contextual environment it is embedded in (e.g. a single 2-digit number

within a list of nonsense syllables or vice versa) will determine whether and what kind of forgetting

mechanisms will be at work, as elegantly shown by Hedwig von Restorff. Gestalt theory criticizes

mainstream memory research for having for decades studied mostly random, structureless items

embedded in their ‘own copies’, fired at the participants at fast rates, one after the other. Hence all

replicated effects regarding encoding, retrieval and forgetting mechanisms were mistakenly believed to

apply across the board while they might so far have only revealed how memory works for nonsingular,

random, ground-like items presented at hasty rates. Yet, we do not live in a world of ground, of

randomness, devoid of structure and meaning. The mechanistic worldview of the empirist encounters

serious challenges when trying to explain how we remember poetry, music, fairy tales, myths, even

conspiracy theories as it shies away from trying to understand structured meaning that goes beyond the

static idea of “schemata” (cf. Bruner, 1990). Hence, it is no wonder that we know very little about these

as we are approaching 150+ years of psychological research. Instead, at least within memory research,

GESTALT MEMORY 51

we see a plethora of “findings”, “effects”, “phenomena”36, which can hardly be coherently explained

even within themselves let alone across all domains of memory, and let alone, cognition in general.37

This paper should be seen as a presentation of the main points and highlights of Gestalt theory’s

conceptualization of memory processes. I believe that even this little glimpse should surprise the reader

as to its richness in ideas and methods. Then, one cannot help ask why neither psychology intro books

and memory textbooks nor memory lectures at universities cover at least one or two of their studies with

the theoretical credit it deserves. We should leave this strange “neglect” to scholars working in

historiography, yet, anyone within psychology, and particularly within cognitive psychology should be

wondering about this. Could it be that the proposals of Gestalt theory, which it took care to put to

empirical test (with the least costly yet most ingenious experiments), were ignored because of its

audacious tenet that memory traces have “inner dynamics”? If so, what was so utterly unacceptable

about this? Could it be that the Anglo-American mainstream simply did not like it as they believed it

would replace the mechanistic with the “uncanny”? Who knows…

All things aside, it is impossible not to see the creative, cleverly crafted, productive, stimulating

and refreshing side of Gestalt theory’s proposals regarding memory. Maybe one of its most exciting

aspects is that a lot of intriguing memory phenomena that appear in literary works, while unaddressed or

unaddressable by current mainstream memory models, find their possible explanations in Gestalt theory.

Even the idea of thinking of time as a “ground” type memory is potentially a brand-new way of looking

at things as it provides a framework of thinking. After all, there should be a way to explain why Hans

Castorp in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain lost his sense of time when he first arrived as a visitor at

36 When browsing the most “in” scientific journals in psychology at the turn of the previous century (e.g. Ebbinghaus’ famous

Zeitschrift für Psychology) one is shocked to see some names with an incredibly high publication record with almost one per

issue, i.e., the “high-scorers”, whose names no one would recognize today. This makes one wonder whether a similar thing

will happen a century from now when people will look back at the “all-rewarded”, “all-promoted” research of today in this

strange climate of publish or perish. How reminiscent of the Tolman & Honzik (1930) study… 37 Let us only think of the countless number of models, theories, theory-like proposals within every, carefully separated niche

of memory research, where researchers turn into experts of their little domains and subdomains, unaware of the findings being

produced minute-by-minute in surrounding areas, as they are all drowned in their own terminology to make cross-talk close to

impossible.

GESTALT MEMORY 52

a sanatorium in Davos to see his tubercular cousin only to be interned himself first for a few days due to

health problems, then for another few days which “in a glimpse of a moment” turned into seven years.

This experience of losing one’s seven years should not be too far from what we have been experiencing

over the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. A vast majority of people report feeling as if those two

years were stolen from them, as if they were “unlived” with no clear memories to refer back to. If

memory research continues to shy away from these real life experiences or does no more than give rating

scales and collect data with no real overarching theory, I am afraid we will be doomed to be doing no

more than beating the air, or as we say in Turkish, beat the water in the mortar.

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