ABSTRACT
The emphasis on transposition was also to engage Gestalt psychologists later in transposition experiments with children and animals; research participants, including animals, tend to respond not so much to absolute brightness or size as to relations like relative brightness, being the largest item in a set, and so forth. Gestalt theory was primarily concerned with thinking, philosophical questions, and learning; the main reason the early Gestalt psychologists concentrated their systematic publications on perception was the Zeitgeist. Christian von Ehrenfels had said that the whole is more than the sum of its parts; the Gestalt psychologists went beyond this and held that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. While the founders of Gestalt psychology had concentrated on cognitive processes such as learning, thinking, intelligence, and perception, Kurt Lewin applied the principles of dynamic self-distribution of forces, the restructuring of the field, and insight primarily to motivation, personality, and social processes.
