How camouflage scrambles visual cognition: Gestalt psychology in the real world
- academicmemories
- Jul 4
- 8 min read
Magdalene Dochnal
Early in the throes of World War I, the French military found itself in crisis. As infantry units sustained great losses across a rapidly modernizing Western Front, France found itself stuck in the mud of the trenches in its royal blue jackets and accompanying bright red pants. In response, the French military would come to form the Camoufleurs. The special department largely composed of contemporary painters was tasked with bringing the military’s uniforms into the 20th century and designing camouflage to hide and obscure large military equipment. Within two years, infantry units ditched their vibrant blue coats and red pants for duller, but more effective uniforms, allowing them to blend in with the Western European landscape.
Hidden inside a (likely apocryphal) story of military history, the Camoufleurs exemplify the broad reach of cognitive psychology. At the same time that the Camoufleurs were studying the art of hiding in plain sight, the field of Gestalt psychology was taking shape in Germany with the aim of understanding how our brains group objects and concepts together to make sense of the world. Using lessons from Gestalt psychology, we can come to better understand how camouflage patterns scramble our visual cognition, and how cognitive psychologists can take their work beyond academia.
Gestalt visual perception
Gestalt psychology has its origins in the early 20th century with the work of Czech psychologist Max Wertheimer and his collaborators at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Wagemans et al., 2012). Wertheimer primarily studied motion perception and theorized that people perceive motion by grouping together changes in an object’s position, creating a cohesive trajectory (1912). This notion was later generalized to a range of sensory modalities to form the broader Gestalt theory which suggests that perception is primarily a process of organization into closed, cohesive, and continuous units, taking its name from the German word for “shape” (Wertheimer, 1923).
In Gestalt theory’s initial form, Wertheimer (1923) described seven principles by which people group visual stimuli when all other conditions are accounted for or assumed:
Proximity: items that appear close to each other are grouped together.
Similarity: items that appear similar are grouped together.
Common fate: items that appear to move in the same direction are grouped together.
Symmetry: items that are symmetrical reflections of one another are grouped together.
Parallelism: items that are parallel to one another are grouped together.
Continuity: items that form a continuous unit are grouped together.
Closure: items that form a closed unit are grouped together.
The advent of cognitive psychology in the decades after World War II would bring renewed interest in Gestalt theory and with it, additional grouping principles such as common region (items that occupy the same space are grouped together; Palmer, 1992) and synchrony (items that change at the same time are grouped together; Alais et al., 1998). These mechanisms appear to manifest both behaviorally and neurally with memory recall benefits for unfamiliar objects that abide by Gestalt principles (Palmer, 1977) and increased neuronal signal change when binding follows Gestalt principles (Mihalas et al., 2011).
Camouflage in the natural world
In nature, camouflage typically adopts one of two approaches, each targeting a different layer of survivability. The most commonly thought of approach is crypsis where an organism possesses a trait or displays a behavior that makes it more difficult to detect (Merilaita et al., 2017; Petersson, 2018). While there are many methods of crypsis across organisms, each of them attempts to disrupt visual grouping processes by influencing a stimulus’ signal-to-noise ratio, the ratio of visual information that is meaningful in detecting an organism to that which is meaningless (Merilaita et al., 2017). Given that Gestalt processes are dependent on differences in stimuli to distinguish groupings from one another, organisms can increase their survivability by reducing the amount of meaningful visual information about themself (reducing signal), increasing the amount of useless visual information (increasing noise), or by doing some combination of the two.
An example of camouflage that reduces signal is countershading whereby the ventral portion, or stomach, of an animal is lighter than the dorsal portion, its back (Rowland et al., 2008; Ruxton et al., 2004). This is especially common in marine organisms like the blue shark (Prionace glauca), which has a white stomach and a steel blue back. Countershading reduces visual information about the blue shark’s shadow, making it more difficult for another marine organism to make judgments about the shark’s shape. When looking from below, the blue shark’s stomach matches the sunlight’s glare on the ocean surface; from above, its blue back blends with the ocean’s depths. This increases the similarity of the blue shark to its environment which makes it difficult for predators such as orcas to detect where the shark’s body begins or ends, enhancing the blue shark’s survivability.
Even when detected, organisms have other ways of enhancing their survivability with the masquerading approach to camouflage (also known as “mimesis”). In masquerading, an organism leverages traits or behaviors that make them more difficult to identify in their environment or increase the likelihood of misidentification (Petersson, 2018; Skelhorn & Rowe, 2016). A great example of such a behavior can be seen in American peppered moth (Biston betularia cognataria) caterpillars who are able to change colors from brown to green to mimic birch and willow branches, respectively (Noor et al., 2008). Even if there are slight discrepancies in the disguise, the fact that a twig-like object shares a common region with branches and looks similar enough to a branch significantly decreases the likelihood that a preying bird will group the caterpillar into any category other than “branch,” or more importantly “inedible” (Rowland et al., 2008; Ruxton et al., 2004; Skelhorn & Rowe, 2016).
Applying nature’s lessons: Military camouflage
Like many other organisms, humans too engage in camouflage. Every military has a vested interest in increasing the survivability of its personnel, and so military camouflage is often used to address the two foremost principles of survivability: do not be detected and do not be identified (Dodge & McKelvey, 2013; Talas et al., 2017). It is these principles of survivability that have guided camouflage design from the khaki uniforms of British occupying forces in India in the mid-1800s to the woodland camouflage of Western European militaries today (Talas et al., 2017). In testing the quality of new camouflage patterns, military researchers leverage findings from cognitive psychology to design computational metrics and assessments of camouflage efficacy. Such metrics and assessments specifically take into account features of human visual cognition such as perceived color differences (Bai et al., 2020), allocation of visual attention (Yang et al., 2021), and how humans group visual stimuli (Li et al., 2023).
A common feature of military camouflage is the technique of background matching, where the colors of a pattern’s operational environment (the setting in which the pattern will be deployed; Dodge & McKelvey, 2013) are used in the pattern’s design to reduce the amount of visual information about the wearer’s shape (Merilaita et al., 2017; Talas et al., 2017). Background matching makes it more difficult to identify an object’s edges, which in turn makes it more difficult to group as a distinct object in the environment (Fraser et al., 2007). However, most contemporary military uniforms are not monochromatic and instead feature many patches of color (Talas et al., 2017). This too aids in camouflage via the technique of disruptive coloration where patches of color are used to mask distinctive features that may lead to identification (Merilaita et al., 2017). These patches introduce false edges and illusory continuities on the wearer’s body which make it more difficult to accurately group the whole body as a continuous unit.
Conclusion
Camouflage is one of countless examples of how cognitive psychology is applied out in the world. This blog article could have just as easily been about the design of highway signage (see Elbardawil, 2022) or how information processing affects driving behaviors (see Macuga et al., 2019). In a time of crisis for American research universities with dramatic cuts in federal grant spending and increased financial precarity for researchers (see Associated Press, 2025; Jaswal et al., 2025), the realm of applied science offers an alternative route for aspiring scientists to continue their careers in psychology. With so much disruption to traditional paths to pursuing a career in science, it is important that educators in psychology do not let their students’ passions for the field waver. Stories from the world of applied science may offer an additional way to foster enthusiasm among young psychology students for research beyond the research university.
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