The tricks our brains are capable of.

What is the difference between the two figures below?

(Links to picture sources)

The answer is simple – the first figure is that of a photo of a panda bear, while the second figure is that of a widely recognized logo of a panda bear. The question still remains though: how do the random pieces of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) logo come together to be easily perceived as the same thing as the realistic figure on the left? The gestalt theory of visual psychology is to thank for this one. “Gestalt,” which translates to “the unified whole,” is a term that derives from the field of psychology, as its name implies. According to the theory, people have the natural tendency to organize visual elements by arranging them into meaningful patterns. For example, in the WWF logo above, the figure itself is incomplete. However, with the Gestalt principle, closure, it is possible for the image to be perceived as a whole image by people’s ability to fill in the missing information to establish unity in the figure.

(Links to picture source)

Interestingly, the WWF logo has gone through a significant transformation over the years – initially appearing as a more complete and realistic-looking panda during the 1960s and 1970s, but morphing into its present-day, incomplete assortment of black and white parts during the 1980s. Although the logo has shifted into a state of less completeness, people are still able to recognize the logo as a whole by unifying these different parts to become the complete panda image.