Gaetano Kanizsa
Gaetano Kanizsa ( born August 18, 1913 in Trieste, † March 14, 1993 ) was an Italian psychologist and is next to his teacher Cesare Musatti and his fellow student Fabio Metelli as one of the leading representatives of Gestalt theory in Italy.
Kanizsa was born the son of a Hungarian father and a Slovenian mother in Trieste. Kanizsa studied for his high school years in Trieste at the University of Padua in Cesare Musatti who had brought the Gestalt psychology to Italy. He graduated in 1938 with a dissertation on eidetic memory. In 1947 he went as assistant professor at the University of Florence in 1953 as a Full Professor at the University of Trieste, where he founded the Institute of Psychology, and taught and conducted research until 1988. His pioneering role in Italian psychology, especially the psychology of perception, the University of Trieste honors by the annual Gaetano Kanizsa Lectures. These provide an important forum for the international perception research dar.
Like his fellow student Fabio Metelli, another important disciple of Musatti, Kanizsa trained a whole generation of Italian researchers perception and Gestalt psychologists, who are sometimes referred to as the Trieste school of Italian Gestalt psychology. Among the most important students Kanizsas: Paolo Bozzi (1930-2003), Walter Gerbino (* 1951), Giovanni Bruno Vicario ( born 1932 ).
In addition to numerous other awards Kanizsa in 1981 awarded an honorary membership of the International Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA ). In 1987 he received together with Riccardo Luccio the Wolfgang Metzger Prize.
The figure on the right bears his name - is the Kanizsa Triangle. It shows an example of a certain kind of " perception deception ", which is called amodal supplement: the viewer sees three black circles and a triangle, another white triangle "float", although the picture as a visual stimulus basis actually only broken lines and circular sectors contains.