Culture and Cognition

Question 1

What is culture and cognition?

Answer 1

Culture plays a role in the creation of our schema - and these, in turn, affect what we remember.
It seems that even although the ability to remember is universal, strategies for remembering are not universal
A part of culture is a group’s lifestyle and how they interact with the environment.
Psychologists have found that cultures that have to interact more with their natural environment may have better spatial memory

Question 2

Aim of Kearins?

Answer 2

To test whether Indigenous Australians might perform better on tests that took advantage of their ability to encode with visual cues.

Question 3

Method of Kearins?

Answer 3

• adolescent desert indigenous Australians and adolescents of white Australian origin were matched for age and sex
  
  • The concept of “standard” testing situations is culturally foreign to Indigenous Australians and the work was done entirely outdoors.
  • 20 objects on a board divided into 20 squares.
  • All told to study the board for 30 seconds.
  • Subsequent task was a reconstruction of the board with the objects in the same arrangement.
  • There were 4 variations of this task
• Artificial different - small man-made objects likely to be familiar to white Australian children, and differing from each other in at least one other way (function etc)
• Natural different - naturally occurring objects, likely to be familiar to desert children (feather, rock etc)
• Artificial same - Small bottles differed in age, size, shape, colour, but were not labelled and not commonplace, so that it would be difficult to verbally distinguish between the bottles.
• Natural same - Small rocks differing in size, shape, colour, texture

Question 4

Findings of Kearins?

Answer 4

• On all four tasks, the Indigenous Australian children correctly relocated more objects than did white Australian children.
• On the artificial different task. This is the task on which the white Australian children scored the highest.
• The Indigenous Australian children showed no significant difference whether the task was “artificial” or “natural.” This means that the objects themselves did not affect the results of the study.

Question 5

Conclusion of Kearins?

Answer 5

• Indigenous Australian children did better overall and seems to have been too easy compared to the white Austrialian children.
  
  • 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. **
  • Results suggest that survival needs may shape and reward a particular way of encoding information in memory.