Similarity in Visually Perceived Forms: By Erich Goldmeier. (Psychological Issues, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Monograph 29.) New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1973. 135 pp.

This is the first English translation of a monograph originally published in German in 1936, which presents a series of interlocking experiments investigating the perception of similarity. Erich Goldmeier's study of the bases for 'similarity in visually perceived forms', like other gestalt investigations of cognitive and perceptual processes, is elegant in its apparent methodological simplicity and its sensitive articulation of the phenomenology of complex perceptual and cognitive processes. Goldmeier's elaboration of the concept of singularity (Prägnanz) in visual forms, like Duncker's and Wertheimer's formulations of functional fixedness and restructuring and Zeigarnik's investigation of the need for completion, is an insightful and penetrating analysis of cognition.

This study of the features of visual stimuli that determine similarity reveals those structures experienced as most salient in a perceptual configuration. Similarity, in a limited number of instances, can be defined in terms of the number of shared identical parts (partial identity) or the proportional relations between parts of the