Design Nomenclature / Composition
Past experience
Also called familiarity, experience, law of familiarity
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
Grouping shaped by what the viewer has seen before rather than by the stimulus itself: a shape parses as a letter, a floor plan, a face because it has been parsed that way thousands of times. The weakest and most culturally loaded of the classical principles, and the easiest to overstate.
In practice
Frequently invoked to defend a convention that is merely familiar to the designer. The evidence supports learned parsing, not any particular pattern you grew up with.