Volume 16 , No. Brady Wagoner. I begin by contextualizing BARTLETT's experiments within the continental research tradition of his time, which was in a state of transition from a focus on elements the concern of psychophysics to a focus on wholes the concern of Gestalt psychology.
The defining feature of BARTLETT's early experiments is his holistic treatment of human responses, in which the basic unit of analysis is the active person relating to some material within the constraints of a social and material context. This manifests itself in a number of methodological principles that contrast with contemporary understandings of experimentation in psychology.
The contrast is further explored by reviewing the history of "replications and extensions" of BARTLETT's experiments, demonstrating how his methodology was progressively changed and misunderstood over time. Key words : experimentation; Bartlett; history of psychology; idiographic analysis; remembering; holistic methodology. From Elements to Wholes: Experimental Psychology, BARTLETT's [] early experimental studies have been praised for their originality and have continued to exert a considerable influence on memory research, as well as on the study of other psychological phenomena.
This critique comes in part from psychology's current understanding of an experiment as the manipulation of an independent variable while holding all other variables constant, and inferring a relation between variables through statistical analysis of a large sample of subjects.
This choice of researchers is necessarily selective, but will suffice to draw out the general background of BARTLETT's approach through an exploration of what he accepted and rejected from each of them. Second, I will review the procedures and findings of his earliest experiments conducted between and Third, I will highlight some of the distinctive features of his methodological approach, which shares much in common with the German-Austrian approach of the time, but diverges in significant ways from contemporary understanding.
