Cross-Cultural Differences in Cognitive Development: Attention to Relations and Objects

Autor/inn/en	Kuwabara, Megumi; Smith, Linda B.
Titel	Cross-Cultural Differences in Cognitive Development: Attention to Relations and Objects
Quelle	In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 113 (2012) 1, S.20-35 (16 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0022-0965
DOI	10.1016/j.jecp.2012.04.009
Schlagwörter	Evidence; Preschool Children; Cultural Differences; Cognitive Development; Task Analysis; Visual Stimuli; Attention; Cognitive Processes; Experiments; Comparative Analysis; Japan; United States + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Evidenz; Pre-school age; Preschool age; Child; Children; Pre-school education; Preschool education; Vorschulalter; Kind; Kinder; Vorschulkind; Vorschulkinder; Vorschulerziehung; Vorschule; Kultureller Unterschied; Kognitive Entwicklung; Aufgabenanalyse; Aufmerksamkeit; Cognitive process; Kognitiver Prozess; Erprobung; USA
Abstract	Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool children in the two cultures. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds from the two cultures ("N" = 64) participated in a relational match-to-standard task in two conditions, with simple or richly detailed objects, in which a focus on individual objects may hurt performance. Rich objects, consistent with past research, strongly limited the performance of U.S. children but not Japanese children. In Experiment 2, U.S. and Japanese 4-year-olds ("N" = 72) participated in a visual search task that required them to find a specific object in a cluttered, but organized as a scene, visual field in which object-centric attention might be expected to aid performance and relational attentional pattern may hinder the performance because of relational structure that was poised by the scene. U.S. children outperformed Japanese children. In Experiment 3, 4-year-olds from both cultures ("N" = 36) participated in a visual search task that was similar to Experiment 2 but with randomly placed objects, where there should not be a difference between the performance of two cultures because the relational structure that may be posed by the scene is eliminated. This double-dissociation is discussed in terms of implications for different developmental trajectories, with different developmental subtasks in the two cultures. (Contains 3 figures.) (As Provided).
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Update	2017/4/10