ABSTRACT
The behaviour of young children seems to be characterised by an inability to integrate the various units of information they have available into structured wholes within which all the elements are articulated in a network of relationships. From the perceptual point of view, this inability is manifested by the failure to relate parts to each other and each part to the whole. The most commonly held hypotheses were that the identification of an object would be facilitated by means of syncretic perception, whilst the perception of differences would be better if details were seen rather than the whole. Syncretism was given the restricted meaning of globalism, which enforced a choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives. Thus observations and experiments were set up to demonstrate the cogency either of globalism or of elementarism, the latter seen as the opposite of syncretism.
