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# Perception, language, and the part-whole problem.

## Details

**Authors** Mooney

**Year** 1951

**Publisher** Book

**Discipline** Cognitive Science

[Read it](https://archive.org/details/perceptionlangua0000moon)

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To take the author's experience as a teacher and apply it to the idea of part-whole structures.

### What they found (results)

In just the act of focusing on and following a pin-point of light, the brain/self has to do many things. In particular, this demonstration showed how essential relationships are to the dynamic of part/wholes. He writes that the very act of perception is creating relationships between parts of an environment/stimulus in order to get a conceptual grasp on the whole. part-whole concepts/tools don’t have to only apply to math, as it is an important cognitive skill and could be used to help students learn in all subjects (he mentioned reading quite a few times).

## Commentary

### In short

Even in 1951, people were aware that part-whole didn’t just apply to the things it came easy to, like mathematics. More importantly, it showed that the relationship between the Part and the Whole needs to be explicated if one is to give a complete conceptual understanding to their students.

### In more detail

Mooney (1951) took his observations as a former teacher on the “part-whole” problem and applied it to a neurological study that attempted to find where Part-Whole grouping occurred in the brain. Mooney was a teacher who throughout his career realized a significant problem in the norms of teaching. “Sooner

or later, those who are responsible for teaching come face to face with the problem of parts versus wholes.” Mooney wrote that every teacher has wondered whether to teach from Parts to Whole, or Whole to Parts. However, he had noticed issues with both of these strategies. If one teaches from the assumption that if you teach the Parts, then you assume that the students will understand the Whole, yet this isn’t the case; there is a disconnect. A similar problem arises when you teach the Whole and assume that the students will know the Parts. He found Part-Whole to be an important conceptual tool for teaching, but it was used primarily in math and not in many other places. He did three “demonstrations,” the first focused on “perception”, the second on “language,” and the third is on both “perception” and “language.” The first demonstration is the most relevant to this review, and will be the one discussed.

The first demonstration was done using pin-points of light. A group of students (one at a time) were put ~20 feet from the “front of the room.” They gave the students time to acclimate to their surroundings. Then they turned off the lights and had the students focus on a “light-tight” box in the front of the room. The only thing that can be seen from the box, is a very small pin-point of light. The light is turned on, and the students are asked to watch the pin-point of light. After about a minute of watching, the light would begin to appear to move. They saw that as the students saw the movement, they would sometimes move their heads to follow the light, even though the actual light itself has never moved. While this apparent movement continued, two additional lights were turned on, the perceived motion ceased, and then continued with all three lights moving in unison. They found that the movement of the single light was more impactful than the movement of the three lights together. When the overhead lights were turned back on, all apparent motion stopped.

This demonstration showed that in just the act of focusing on and following a pin-point of light, the brain/self has to do many things. In particular, this demonstration showed how essential relationships are to the dynamic of part/wholes. He writes that the very act of perception is creating relationships between parts of an environment/stimulus in order to get a conceptual grasp on the whole. Moony writes, “When a relation is accomplished, those things which had been taken as different are taken as included in a "one", whereupon the "one" is taken as assumption for further action, with attention turning elsewhere as an invitation to further relationships, at which time the things which had formerly been sensed as stable are then sensed as moveable. The greater the number of differences included within a relationship (or a system of relations), the greater the apparent stability of the field.” The reason that people have to operate in relationships is that we don’t have the environment living in our heads with us. In order to get to a semblance of the reality one exists in, one has to build relationships between the environment and the self. This is done in a couple ways, the one demonstrated here is perception.

**Patterns it shows** S

**How to cite this** Mooney (1951). Perception, language, and the part-whole problem.. Book.