Algom Daniel, Fitousi Daniel
School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo 6997801, Israel.
School of Communication Disorders, Achva Academic College, Arugot 4567889, Israel.
Entropy (Basel). 2025 Apr 17;27(4):434. doi: 10.3390/e27040434.
In 1948, Claude Shannon published a revolutionary paper on communication and information in engineering, one that made its way into the psychology of perception and changed it for good. However, the path to truly successful applications to psychology has been slow and bumpy. In this article, we present a readable account of that path, explaining the early difficulties as well as the creative solutions offered. The latter include Garner's theory of sets and redundancy as well as mathematical group theory. These solutions, in turn, enabled rigorous objective definitions to the hitherto subjective Gestalt concepts of figural goodness, order, randomness, and predictability. More recent developments enabled the definition of, in an exact mathematical sense, the key notion of complexity. In this article, we demonstrate, for the first time, the presence of the association between people's subjective impression of figural goodness and the pattern's objective complexity. The more attractive the pattern appears to perception, the less complex it is and the smaller the set of subjectively similar patterns.
1948年，克劳德·香农发表了一篇关于工程学中通信与信息的具有革命性的论文，这篇论文进入了感知心理学领域并彻底改变了它。然而，在心理学领域真正成功应用的道路一直缓慢且坎坷。在本文中，我们对这条道路进行了通俗易懂的阐述，解释了早期遇到的困难以及提出的创造性解决方案。后者包括加纳的集合与冗余理论以及数学群论。这些解决方案进而为迄今主观的格式塔概念，如图形优度、秩序、随机性和可预测性，提供了严格的客观定义。最近的进展使得能够从精确的数学意义上定义复杂性这一关键概念。在本文中，我们首次证明了人们对图形优度的主观印象与图案的客观复杂性之间存在关联。图案在感知上看起来越有吸引力，它就越不复杂，并且主观上相似图案的集合就越小。
