Psychology Roots
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Figure-Ground
The Gestalt Psychologists studied all sorts of perceptual organization–the ways that humans organize information about what they see, hear, etc. What they found was that there are two main visual components necessary for a person to see an object properly; a figure (the object) and the ground (the background or surroundings in which the object occurs). Thus, when you look at a picture on a wall, the picture is the figure and you can distinguish it clearly from its surroundings, the wall (ground).
