Visual Thinking Research - Gestalt Laws

Cat Puzzle.  Aim: Count the triangles in the cat.

I worked with my house-mate on this puzzle and although the concept is relatively simple, it actually took quite a few try's to figure it out.  David's is on the left and mine is on the right.

I outlined each triangle and numbered and numbered them as I counted,  this made the cat look rather messy and caused me to miss out 2 of the harder triangles to spot - in the tail because they are all similar colours and all grouped together and this makes it harder to distinguish them due to Gestalt's similarity and proximity laws.

David was much neater in the way he counted his triangles by just putting a dot in each triangle when he had counted it.  He still came into problems on the tail and made him retrace his counting steps many times and he became very unsure of how many triangles there actually were. He eventually came to the conclusion that there are 19 triangles - he missed one out which he outlined.

Due to the similarity of the shapes, orientation and overlapping of triangles, what you would think of to be a simple task actually becomes somewhat challenging.

Rose Puzzle.  Aim: Replant the ring of roses to create 8 rows, 9 rows and 10 rows - each with 3 roses in each row.

This was actually quite a challenge for David and I.  I used a separate piece of paper and used circles and stars to represent the roses and David used the same tiny dots he used in the first puzzle.  This time my way proved to be easier to see as the tiny dots were difficult to figure out if they were in rows or not.
We both worked out the first exercise, creating a square of 3x3 roses.
The rest we sat and pondered over for quite some time before coming to the conclusion that it was an impossible task and unfortunately gave up.

When I looked at the conclusion - I still found the rows difficult to see and hard to count without repeating them twice or even 3 times.  This is because of the similarity of all the roses and rows and the proximity of them to one another.  This causes us to look at them and just see a group of roses rather than seeing each individual rose and separate row.  Also the lack f being able to manipulate them on paper also made it hard.  I feel that if we had made red counters and moved them around on a grid it may have been easier to work out - although we would still have the problems of seeing them as a group.