The Gestalt psychologists maintained that when people perceive sensory elements

The Gestalt psychologists in the early 20th century set out to discover a set of principles through which we interpret sensory information.  These psychologists brought up the idea that we have a tendency to see things in terms of the entire form or pattern rather than just individual parts. They were able to demonstrate the many ways the brain manages to view things simply as a whole and not get over complicated by being able to distinguish every little detail. Therefore, the Gestalt Perspective can explain figure-ground, similarity, proximity and closure as basic principles of perceptual organization.

The figure-ground principle is exactly as it says, to be able to distinguish a figure apart from the ground on which they appear. For example, we can distinguish a voice of a particular person that you may be talking to, apart from all the other noises on a train.  This way it makes it easier on the brain, and it doesn’t get confused with all the different sounds that can be possible.

The similarity principle says that we have a tendency to view objects that are similar in color, size, or shape as a pattern instead of individually looking at each object as alone. If there were a picture with a line of vertical dots and another vertical line with squares repeating the brain would view it as a pattern, not as horizontal lines dots and squares repeating over and over. This happens because the brain would rather see an overview image rather than a bunch of lines of multiple shapes repeating.

Proximity is the principle when objects are close to one another we tend to perceive them together rather than separate objects.  A group of 7 triangles spread out but close enough to each other that the brain will perceive them as pairs of triangles rather than individual triangles.

Lastly, the closure principle is that we overlook incompleteness in sensory information to perceive a whole object even when it does not actually exist. When viewing an image of two less than and greater than signs, the mind tends to fill in the gap making it seem as if there were a shape of a rhombus.

These basic principles of perceptual organization help us get a better understanding of how the brain manages to perceive things in such a simple way instead of complicating it.