Location In Research

Dr Kohler's book takes a central role in this body of research. This is essentially a scientific explaination of why it is that comic books play so well to human perception. This is a basis for explaining why it might be that comic book visual and narrative devices may ease the creation of meaning in an embodied interaction.

The basic thrust of Gestalt Psycology according to Kohler is that an given phenomenon will be made sense of only in terms of the subjectivity of the observer, their past experience and the specific environment in which the phenomenon arises. Essentially the parts being greater than the sum of the whole.

Through a process of what Kohler terms "closure", humans will automatically attempt to make sense of any object placed before them no matter how it may be camoflaged. Words may still be readable after being crossed out, the face / vase diagram looks to some like a picture of two faces in profile, to others like a vase but to no-one does it look like both simultaneously.

Gestalt Psycology posits that our perception relys on certain attributes to make sense of objects, these are:

• Continuity: Does an object appear as a natural extension of another, the downstroke in a lower case letter t for example appears as one curved line rather than two lines broken by one or two horizontal lines.
• Proximity: This allows the grouping of letters in this sentence to form words in that some are closer together than others. Without proximity written language would not exist in its current form.
• Similarity: Circular road signs give instructions, triangular ones give warnings. Without similarity, this grouping would not make sense.