Frans de Waal on Perception:

Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics:

"Everyone can look, but actually perceiving is something that has to be learned. This is a constantly recurring problem when new students arrive. For the first few weeks they 'see' nothing at all. When I explain to them at the end of an aggressive incident in the colony that 'Yeroen rushed up to Mama and slapped her, whereupon Gorilla and Mama joined forces and pursued Yeroen, who sought refuge with Nikkie,' they look at me as if I am crazy. Whereas to me this is a superficial summary of a fairly simple interaction (only four chimpanzees were involved), the students have only seen a few black beasts chaotically charging around uttering ear-piercing screams. They probably will have missed the hard slap.

At such times I have to remember that I too went through a long period when I found myself wondering at the apparent lack of structure in these episodes, whereas the real problem was not the lack of structure but my own lack of perception. It is necessary to be completely familiar with the many individuals, their respective friendships and rivalries, all their gestures, characteristic sounds, facial expressions, and other kinds of behavior. Only then do the wild scenes we see actually begin to make sense.

Initially we only see what we recognize. Someone who knows nothing about chess and who watches a game between two players will not be aware of the tension on the board. Even if the watcher stays for an hour, he or she will still have great difficulty in accurately reproducing the state of the play on another board. A grand master, on the other hand, would grasp and memorize the position of every piece in one concentrated glance of a few seconds. This is not a difference of memory, but of perception. Whereas to the uninitiated the positions of the chess pieces are unrelated, the initiated attach great significance to them and see how they threaten and cover each other. It is easier to remember something with a structure than a chaotic jumble.

This is the synthesizing principle of the so-called Gestalt perception: the whole, or Gestalt, is more than the sum of its parts. Learning to perceive is learning to recognize the patterns in which the components regularly occur. Once we are familiar with the patterns of interaction between chess pieces or chimpanzees, they seem so striking and obvious that it is difficult to imagine how other people can get bogged down in all kinds of detail and miss the essential logic of the maneuvers."

[Siehe auch: Konrad Lorenz über die Gestaltwahrnehmung]