Gaetano Kanizsa

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Gaetano Kanizsa (born August 18, 1913 in Trieste ; † March 14, 1993 ) was an Italian psychologist and, along with his teacher Cesare Musatti and his fellow student Fabio Metelli, is one of the leading representatives of Gestalt theory in Italy.

Kanizsa triangle

Life

Kanizsa was born in Trieste to a Hungarian father and a Slovenian mother. After finishing high school in Trieste, Kanizsa studied at the University of Padua with Cesare Musatti , who brought gestalt psychology to Italy. He completed his studies in 1938 with a dissertation on eidetic memory . Due to the race laws he was denied teaching at the university and his Italian citizenship was revoked. However, he managed to escape exile and go to Rome, where he joined the anti-fascist resistance. After the end of the war, he went to the University of Florence as a university assistant in 1947 . In 1953 he was appointed full professor at the University of Trieste , where he founded the Psychological Institute and taught and researched until 1988. The University of Trieste honors his pioneering role in Italian psychology, especially in perceptual psychology, with the annual Gaetano Kanizsa Lectures . These represent an important forum for international perception research.

Like his fellow student Fabio Metelli , another important student of Musatti, Kanizsa trained a whole generation of Italian perception researchers and Gestalt psychologists, who are sometimes referred to as the Trieste School of Italian Gestalt Psychology. Among the most important students of Kanizsa are: Paolo Bozzi (1930–2003), Walter Gerbino (* 1951), Giovanni Bruno Vicario (* 1932).

In addition to numerous other awards, Kanizsa was made honorary membership of the International Society for Gestalt Theory and Its Applications (GTA) in 1981 . In 1987 he and Riccardo Luccio received the Wolfgang Metzger Prize.

The picture on the right bears his name - it is the Kanizsa triangle . It shows an example of a certain type of " perception illusion ", which is called an amodal addition : the viewer sees another white triangle "hovering" over three black circles and a triangle, although the image as a visual stimulus is actually only broken lines and circular sectors contains.

Fonts

  • 1979: Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perception. New York: Praeger. ISBN 0275903737
  • 1980: Grammatica del vedere. Bologna: Il Mulino. New edition 1997: ISBN 8815060901

literature

  • 1984: Conoscenza E Struttura. Festschrift Per Gaetano Kanizsa (Walter Gerbino Ed). Bologna: Il Mulino. ISBN 8815007903
  • 2003: The Legacy of Gaetano Kanizsa in Cognitive Science, ed. By Liliana Albertazzi. Axiomathes , Special Issue 3-4 / 2003.
  • 2005: On the topicality of W. Metzger's work (translation from the Italian by Irene Agstner). Gestalt Theory 27 (3/2005), 184-203.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see: Riccardo Luccio (2003): The Emgergence of Praegnanz - Gaetano Kanizsa's Legacies, Axiomathes, 13 , 367.
  2. ^ Ian Verstegen (2000), Gestalt psychology in Italy , Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36 (1), 31-42; R. Valdevit & F. Toccafondi (2007), Gestalt Psychology in Italy - Tradition and Current Issues , in H. Metz-Göckel (Ed.), Gestalt Theory Current - Handbook on Gestalt Theory Volume 1, Vienna: Krammer, pp. 113–129.
  3. ↑ see Mario Zanforlin (2004), Gestalt Theory in Italy - Is it still alive? Gestalt Theory, Vol. 26 (4), 293-305 ( PDF )
personal data
SURNAME Kanizsa, Gaetano
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Trieste
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1993