Talking about design, most discussions circulate around physical objects or products, around their invention, development, production and marketing. While most modern design approaches do also cover questions pertaining to human interaction, e.g. within user- or human-centred design philosophies, a systematic and fundamental conception of the role and implications that human perception and emo-cognitive processing take with regard to designing physical goods is lacking. Under the umbrella term ‘Psychology of Design’, I will develop and elaborate on psychological dimensions that are highly relevant to the optimization and evaluation of design. I propagate a general psychological turn in design theory and practice in order to purposefully include not only the top-down processes triggered by context, framing, expectation, knowledge or habituation but also the psychological effects of Gestalt and Zeitgeist. Such psychological effects have the potential to determine whether the very same physical design will be aesthetically appreciated, desired, loved or rejected in the end. Psychology of design has a tremendous influence on the success and sustainability of design by triggering associations and displaying demand characteristics in a multimodal way. The paper is based on fundamental psychological theories and empirical evidences which are linked to applied examples from the world of art and design.

Introduction: Pulmonary Embolism (PE) is a difficult to diagnose presentation associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Despite development of risk stratification tools (RST), physician gestalt continues to play a large role in the diagnostic evaluation of PE. Implicit in this gestalt is the evaluation of PE risk factors (RF). It is unknown, however, if physicians are similar and accurate in their assessment of known PE RF. Methods: An online survey presented paired comparisons (n=55) of 11 known PE RF to active Emergency Physicians (n=20), Family Doctors (n=11), and Residents (Family Medicine [n=20]; Emergency Medicine [n=5]). The Bradley-Terry Model converted the paired comparisons to rank order lists for the cohorts and these lists were compared. The perceived efficacy and use of RST and gestalt was also assessed across the cohorts. Results: The response rate was 72%. Emergency Physicians had the highest perception of gestalt as an effective method of risk stratification (7.4±1.4 out of 10) while Family Medicine Residents had the lowest (5.1±1.9). More than 95% of Emergency Physicians and Residents employed RST (PERC and Wells) compared to 46% of Family Physician respondents. Those who used RST utilized the tools in the majority of their clinical encounters (>75% of the time). There was good agreement between the cohorts in regards to their rank order lists (Tau-b ≥ 0.71). Age was identified as a RF which was consistently ranked lower than literature reported values amongst the cohorts. Conclusion: Physicians in various practice settings and levels of training rank PE risk factors similarly when forced to compare them. There are important RF, most notably age, which were identified in the current study that were consistently undervalued. This finding may highlight how RST are shaping perceptions of PE RF through their use and how age as a PE RF may warrant more attention in education and clinical assessments.

In this paper, ideas from perceptual dialectology, linguistics of speech, and cognitive science are drawn upon to explain the perceptions of others’ speech. The perceptual map task, based on Preston’s “Draw-a-map methodology,” was collected from 215 respondents in Poland and transformed into result maps. The second step in the analysis of the perceptual maps was to collect all of the labels that were assigned to the perceived speech varieties around the country. Those two facets of the data show how the idea of connecting speech with a specific locality can be observed quantitatively. The results propose an explanation of the distribution of speech perceptions in Poland. The shape of the perceptions is created through activating gestalt processes to arrive with an observational artifact. Those are based mostly on the concept of geography facilitated by shared cultural schemas. All of those steps lead to a creation of multidimensional perceptual regions.

It has been said that we are the sum of all we have met. As a learner in the emergency department, I have a lot of meeting to do. Take Sandy, a 35-year-old single mother.

Her triage note reads that she came to the hospital after losing her breath bathing her 3-year-old daughter.

If you had read it.

If you had asked her, she would have told you that she’s been sweating through her clothing during the day, causing her colleagues in the university administrative office to stare awkwardly. She says no to your list of Pulmonary Embolism Rule-Out Criteria (PERC) criteria queries, uses a copper intrauterine device (IUD) as birth control (it was the cheapest option), and is healthy, as far as she knows.

If you had asked her.

If you had listened, she would have described a difficult social situation that had left her the sole provider for her young daughter. She walks the local drag once or twice a month, selling sex to whomever will buy as her current job does not pay enough to make rent every 30 days.

For some companies, visual inspection has become an essential step when seeking to improve the quality of their products. The aim of this control is to be sure of the perceived quality of the product, which often goes well beyond the quality expected by the customer. For this type of control, the controller should be able to detect any anomaly on a product, characterize this anomaly, and then evaluate it in order to decide if the product should be accepted or rejected. This paper describes how this characterization can be carried out and, more specifically, how to measure the impact of the local environment of an anomaly on the perceived quality of the product.

Psychophysical scaling models of the form R = f(I), with R the response and I some intensity of an attribute, all assume that people judge the amounts of an attribute. With simple biases excepted, most also assume that judgments are independent of space, time, and features of the situation other than the one being judged. Many data support these ideas: Magnitude estimations of brightness (R) increase with luminance (I). Nevertheless, I argue that the general model is wrong. The stabilized retinal image literature shows that nothing is seen if light does not change over time. The classification literature shows that dimensions often combine to produce emergent properties that cannot be described by the elements in the stimulus. These and other effects cannot be adjusted for by simply adding variables to the general model because some factors do not combine linearly. The proposed alternative is that people initially judge the entire stimulus – the object in terms of its environment. This agrees with the constancy literature that shows that objects and their attributes are identified through their relations to other aspects of the scene. That the environment determines judgments is masked in scaling studies where the standard procedure is to hold context constant. In a typical brightness study (where different lights are presented on the same background on different trials) the essential stimulus might be the intensity of the light or a difference between the light and the background. The two are perfectly confounded. This issue is examined in the case of audition. Judgments of the loudness of a tone depend on how much that tone differs from the previous tone in both pitch and loudness. To judge loudness (and other attributes) people first seem to process the stimulus object in terms of differences between it and other aspects in the situation; only then do they assess the feature of interest. Psychophysical judgments will therefore be better interpreted by theories of attention that are based in biology or psychology than those (following Fechner) that are based in classical physics.

The Three Approaches to Psychotherapy (TAP) videotape series introduces students to three major schools of psychotherapy: client-centered therapy, Gestalt therapy, and rational–emotive therapy. A sample of undergraduate students viewed the TAP series. The students were surveyed about their observations of Gestalt therapy and Fritz Perls' interactions with and treatment of Gloria, the client. This importance of the film series is its presentation of psychotherapy as done in that time by the founders of these schools. Videotapes are routinely employed educationally to show therapy techniques and illuminate theory. This paper examines the usefulness of this video to teach gestalt therapy to psychology students in four sections — two underclass and two upper class sections — in the same term. Student perceptions of this 40-year-old film series are explored. The gender relationship of therapist and client is shown as an example of the apparent sexism of the culture and cognitive processes of the time and its participants. Results found to today's instructionally sophisticated students agreed with Perls' explanation and portrayal of gestalt therapy and interactions with Gloria, his adult client.

A serious crisis is identified in theories of neurocomputation, marked by a persistent disparity between the phenomenological or experiential account of visual perception and the neurophysiological level of description of the visual system. In particular, conventional concepts of neural processing offer no explanation for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt theory. The problem is paradigmatic and can be traced to contemporary concepts of the functional role of the neural cell, known as the Neuron Doctrine. In the absence of an alternative neurophysiologically plausible model, I propose a perceptual modeling approach, to model the percept as experienced subjectively, rather than modeling the objective neurophysiological state of the visual system that supposedly subserves that experience. A Gestalt Bubble model is presented to demonstrate how the elusive Gestalt principles of emergence, reification, and invariance can be expressed in a quantitative model of the subjective experience of visual consciousness. That model in turn reveals a unique computational strategy underlying visual processing, which is unlike any algorithm devised by man, and certainly unlike the atomistic feed-forward model of neurocomputation offered by the Neuron Doctrine paradigm. The perceptual modeling approach reveals the primary function of perception as that of generating a fully spatial virtual-reality replica of the external world in an internal representation. The common objections to this “picture-in-the-head” concept of perceptual representation are shown to be ill founded.

Two experiments investigated the neural mechanisms of Gestalt grouping by recording high-density event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during discrimination tasks. In Experiment 1, stimulus arrays contained luminance-defined local elements that were either evenly spaced or grouped into columns or rows based on either proximity or similarity of shape. Proximity grouping was indexed by a short-latency positivity (110–120 ms) over the medial occipital cortex and a subsequent right occipitoparietal negativity. Grouping by similarity was reflected only in a long-latency occipitotemporal negativity. In Experiment 2, proximity grouping was examined when local elements were defined by motion cues, and was again associated with a medial occipital positivity. However, the subsequent long-latency negativity was now enhanced over the left posterior areas. The implications of these results to the neural substrates subserving different grouping processes are discussed.