L23 - Cross-Cultural Differences in cognitive development Flashcards
1
Q
How are cognitive sciences interdisciplinary? What is the link and differences between psychology and anthropology?
A
- Psychology and anthropology differ in their content area of focus and difference in research methods
- Anthropology uses ethnography
- Psychology uses lab experiments
2
Q
What are individualist cultures vs collectivist cultures in psychology?
A
- Places where most of the psychology research comes from is individualistic
- Also individualistic cultures have different focuses on research
3
Q
How do individualistic vs collectivist cultures have a different focus on research?
A
E.g. in a survey of statements
- Individualistic statements are about competition whereas collectivist statements are about interconnection with the community
- Independent vs interdependent role
4
Q
How do cultural values impact our responses in research (e.g. object vs relational focus)?
A
- Experimental cognitive paradigm has given that these broad cultural values are realized in a moment to moment ways in which we encode, pay attention and remember things
- They give us strategies for interpreting the environment
- E.g. Often Asian participants are more relational when they describe/remember scenes
- In the study you are asked to remember the animal, the background is being changed, and then shown the animal again and asked if they have seen that animal before
- US PPT had no trouble in naming animals when background was being changed
- Hong Kong PPT found it more difficult - like the background was targeted to the memory of this object
- So idea of interconnectedness when you are encoding objects in certain cultures
- American culture doesn’t focus on the context, they focus on the individual
- Asian cultures you have to understand the whole context
5
Q
What has research with European Americans shown about relational abilities?
A
- During preschool years, research with European Americans show that both relational abilities improve and the ability to selectively attend to individual objects/one event at a time
- So ability to understand the relationships between objects improve but also the selective attention to focus on individual objects attend your focus to concentrate on individual items also improves
6
Q
What is the pattern of relational abilities like Japanese children vs USA preschool children?
A
- When there is only relational or object information, they show no difference, but when there is rich information for both objects and relations, then Japanese show attention to relations and USA show attention to objects
Kara and Smith (2012)
- A
- Simple objects
- Match the sample task (so choose the correct choice that matches the target)
- Increasing in difficulty across
- B
- Rich objects
- Perceptual information and object category
- Graph shows…
- Japanese kids are just as good on matching the relations in the simple objects and rich objects
- American kids are worse at matching their relational patterns when there are rich objects compared to when there are simple objects
- So the extra object information - not able to sort of recognize common relationships as difficult to aim their attention
7
Q
What is the pattern of relational abilities like Japanese children vs USA preschool children in visual search tasks?
A
- In visual object search task where the target is in a cluttered scene
- American kids are faster than Japanese kids at finding the object in the visual search
- So in this sort of scene (shown in A) they can focus on the individual and ignore rich objects
- In B, there is not difference in reaction times of how fast they are - only a difference when the context is rich and distracting
- Individual cultures name objects more whereas collectivist cultures may take away the objects interaction and place in the environment more as a key takeaway
- American kids are faster than Japanese kids at finding the object in the visual search
8
Q
So overall how does individualism vs collectivism influence object and relational focus?
A
- Cultural values provide strategies of what information to attend to and extract from the environment, detectable as early as 4 years-old
- The interdependent self-conception of collectivist cultures leads to relational focus
- The independent self-conception of individualism leads
to object focus
9
Q
For Caucasian/European Descent compared to Indigenous Central American - What is first hand learning through intent participation?
A
- Intent participation → when even quiet observation is seen as a form of participation. Being a good observer, and strategies for learning via observation are explicitly communicated to children in Asia and central America, among other cultures
- “assembly-line instruction” → which is based on transmission of information from experts, outside the context of productive, purposive activity. Common in US schools
- Children in East Africa were more likely to be involved in daily chores and adult responsibilities than US children
- Children in these communities are more likely to be directly involved, and this affects how they observe when they are not
- Factory model
- Teacher strives for efficiency in the delivery of knowledge
and applies incentives (or punishments) to induce children to cooperate in the production process. - The students cannot speak or help each other without permission from the teacher.
- Teacher strives for efficiency in the delivery of knowledge
- Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R. M., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003)
- Western schooling fundamentally changed the relationship between children and adults, and how children learn from adults
- Schools isolate children from adult activities
- Pre-industrialization western children learned from adults by directly participating in adult activities, e.g., farming
- Current indigenous communities show these practices
10
Q
What occurs to indigenous children in the process of firsthand learning through intent participation?
A
- Often children of indigenous backgrounds get into trouble in school because they attempt to collaborate with other students and don’t seek permission.
- Spontaneous adult problem-solving in Native American cultures is more collective, with an understanding that people have different and complementary skills. Much less of a manager- who-delegates process compared to European Americans
- Western assessment requires distinguishing people as high vs. low performers; not about discovering complementary abilities in collaboration
11
Q
What is simultaneous vs alternating attention? How did different cultures perform?
A
- In simultaneous attention, the child skillfully attended to two or more events with no pause or interruption in the flow of one activity or the sake of the other. Both activities were carried out at the same time, with each line of attention maintained as continuously as if there were no other focus
- In alternating attention, the child attended to two events, but with a momentary interruption in the flow of one activity for the sake of another, moving sequentially from one to the other and back quickly, keeping both going but with one temporarily placed on hold. There was a small perceivable break in one activity when the other was attended to. Nothing demanding happened in the event on hold while attention was directed to the other event, but both foci were kept active, without being finished or abandoned in the meantime
- Simultaneous attention was negatively correlated with question asking.
- Authors interpret this as a sign that they are better at learning via observation.
- Other interpretations possible of that correlation.
- The more you go to formal western schools, the more you lose the simultaneous attention style and the more you do alternating attention
12
Q
How does a child’s attention to interactions directed to others differ in Guatemalan Mayan and European American patterns?
A
- Two kids at a time, woman shows kids how to make different toys. Then they have to make both type of toys (e.g. mouse and frog), how much do the kids learn when attention is not being directed towards them.
- European American kids are not paying attention to the other kids demonstration whereas the other kids are
- Don’t see the effects in the easy toy
- When attempting to build the frog, American kids need more help when they were not taught directly whereas Mayan kids need less help
13
Q
What is a summary of firsthand learning through intent participation and the differences in cultures?
A
- School fundamentally changes the way children and adults interact, where children learn away from the adult activities that the learning is supposed to eventually prepare them for
- There is a focus on transmission of knowledge from expert to
novice, and individual assessment - Children from indigenous communities learn via intent
participation and observation of genuine adult activity - Cognitive consequences: indigenous children can at once
attend to models to learn from and perform their own actions – White children do not attend to lessons directed to others, and need to alternate attention between model and their own actions when learning from a model
14
Q
How do native and European Americans differ in folk biology (beliefs about relationship to nature?
A
- Ojaleheto & Medin (2015)
- Native → They are part of nature
- European → To respect nature
- Asked 5-7 year old children “Why do these (e.g., frog and lily pad) go together?
- Compared to rural European Americans, Native American children more likely to mention food chain relations, their utility for people, and mimic sounds of animals
- Native American adults when telling a story about animals,
sometimes become the animal in gesture, not just depict the
animal in a place
15
Q
How did Native and European Americans vary based on category-based induction of folk-biology?
A
- Category-based induction: generalizations based on category knowledge
- If an emu has omenatum in their bones, how likely is it that all birds do?
- If a crow has omenatum in their bones, how likely is it that all birds do? (most people would say crow makes it more likely because it’s a more typical bird)
- Carey (1985) showed that 4 year-olds, unlike 10 year-olds and adult do not use these kinds of similarity relations, but instead privilege humans as bases of induction
- If humans have omenatum, then lots of animals do
- Generalize to animals from humans more so than from dogs, despite dog being more similar to other animals according to adults
- Just because animals don’t have it doesn’t mean that humans have it
- Assymetric generalisation: more so from human to animals than animals to humans
16
Q
How does psychology first concept differ in European Americans vs Native?
A
- Carey (1985): “folk psychology” precedes “folk biology” where people are the center of reasoning about the natural world
- Claimed developmental universal
- Used urban white middle-class children, who may know little abou nature
- Medin, Waxman, Unsworth, Bang and colleagues compare urban European American, rural European American, and rural Native American
- Children ranged from 4 – 10 years old
- Half told humans had omenatum, half told dogs did
- Then shown pictures of and asked if they had
omenatum:- human, dog, bear, aardvark, eagle, toucan, trout, angelfish, bee, fly, maple, dandelion, sun, rock, computer, pencil
- Children generalized to non-living things the least, then some to plants, but mostly to animals
- Just between humans and dogs Menominee didn’t show too much different
- Psychology-first pattern is specific to more European Americans
- Children ranged from 4 – 10 years old
