Chapter 4: Culture on Cognition Flashcards
Kearins: 1981
A: To compare Aboriginal adolescents’ spatial memory to that of non-Aboriginal Australian adolescent.
M: Quasi experiment. The sample consisted of 44 Aboriginal adolescents (ages 12-16) who spoke english as a second language, and 44 white Australian adolescents, each group having a mix of both boys and girls.
P: 20 objects were placed on 20 squares. 88 children in total, half aboriginal, half white Australian. They were to examine the board for 30 seconds, then the objects were gathered and placed in a pile in the centre of the board and the children had to put the objects back in the original arrangement.
There were four variations:
Artificial different: 20 small man-made objects likely to be familiar to the white Australian children, differing in at least one way.
Natural different: 20 naturally occurring objects, likely to be familiar to aboriginals.
Artificial same. 12 bottle arranged in a 4x3 matrix, differing in age, size, shape, colour but not labelled and not commonplace so that it would be difficult to verbally distinguish
Natural same: 12 small rocks differing in size, shape, colour, texture.
R: Aboriginal children placed more objects correctly- on all tests. The closest was in the artificial runs. For the aboriginal children, however, it did not matter result wise whether the items were natural or artificial.
50% of the children got all of the items in the 12 item run right, 20% in the 20 item run. For white only about 5% got two right, and 18% got one of the four 100% right, and 0% got all four right. 41% of aboriginals got 2 right, 75% at least one.
The Aboriginal children sat more still and did not speak to the researcher during the tests. They were also more deliberate in their placements. The white students on the other hand were more indecisive and talked to themselves or the researchers during the study.
C: Aboriginal children remembered better due to their upbringing and that their way of life had an impact on how and what they remember. She concluded that the survival of the indigenous Australians in the harsh desert landscape had encouraged and rewarded their ability to store or encode information using visual retrieval cues. These interesting results suggest that survival needs may shape and reward a particular way of encoding information in memory.
E: As this was a quasi experiment, the independent variable (culture) could not be manipulated. To prove reliability, the experiment could be repeated with other groups of indigenous and non-indigenous adolescents. It is difficult to determine what caused the difference in cognition. The indiginous australians were adapted to the modern way of life, so it is either their genes that are causing the ability to re
There may have been an age disparity between the groups, as written this is unknown, but could affect results if one group had more older participants.
Cole and Scribner (1974)
A: To investigate how culture affects memory strategies.
M: Emic approach (field experiment), purposive sampling
P: studied Liberian children attending school and children, not in school, as well as American schoolchildren, comparisons between their performances. They made use of a free-recall task, in which the children were shown a list of items after which they were required to see how much they could recall (the researchers focusing on how they remember and categorize the items).
R: Liberian children who did not attend school showed no increase in memorization. These children could only remember 2 more items after 15 repeated trials. In contrast, both Liberian and American schoolchildren quickly memorized the items on the list. This is because the school children used chunking as their method of memorization and the non-attending children did not. Another trial structured the items in a meaningful and sensical way, showing that the non-attending children could more easily remember the items.
C: Although the ability to remember is universal, the strategies of doing so are not. Children’s memorization strategies differ based on what methods are relevant to their everyday lives as well as what they are taught.
E: -Generally generalizable, as two different cultures were compared with each other. -Relatively high ecological validity, as children performed tests in a natural environment
-Increased credibility, which can be inferred from the fact that they ensured all the children were familiar with the words. A con is that reality is not entirely reflected as children did not do recall tests in their daily lives
Kulkofsky et al. (2011)
A: To investigate whether there was any difference in the rate of flashbulb memories in collectivist and individualistic cultures.
M: Etic approach. Questionnaire (Correlational study), Stratified random sampling
P: The sample was made up of 275 participants from China, Germany, Turkey, the UK, and the USA. Participants were asked to recall as many flashbulb memories as possible in five minutes, to which they were given a memory questionnaire in their respective languages with five questions that dealt with how and when they heard about the event.
R: In collectivistic societies such as China personal importance and emotion played less of a role in forming flash-bulb memories than individualistic societies such as the United States. Focus on one’s own personal experience is less important in collectivistic societies, so that is why it is less important to include it in the formation of FBM.
C: Collectivistic societies put less emphasis on personal experience and emotion, so therefore less significance is put on these factors when forming flash-bulb memories unless the event is of national importance.
E: - Increased credibility: Questionnaires were translated, so no confounding variable nor interviewer effects here.
Ecological fallacy: participants are not necessarily representative of their respective countries and how the population generally deals with flash bulb memories.
