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(with Douglas Medin & Sandy Waxman)
This project targets the interaction of cognitve
development, culture and experience within the field of folkbiology. The premise
is that children of different ages carry already a host of theories and
knowledge acquired through different channels and by different means; that
these theories differ across culture and across levels of experience; and that
these differences are important in the cognitive development of a child.
In particular, the research will explore differences in folkbiological theories
as they emerge in a child’s development across different populations. The aim
is to show that both culture as well as experiential opportunities are
important factors in the cognitive development of children. There is a huge gap
in the literature because both, anthropology and psychology evaded this
problems for different reasons. While anthropology almost altogether avoided the
study of child development, psychology focused on very narrow sets of
populations, assuming universal patterns around the globe. Recent research on
mental models among adults, however, showed that many of the end products of
development – the adult models - are by no means universal. Therefore, this
research is crucial for our understanding of (a) cognitive development in
general, (b) the emergence and effect of cultural knowledge. These issues are
even more important as children from different cultural backgrounds
increasingly attend our schools.
Proven methods are used to assess the folkbiological concepts of children of
different ages across cultures. It is important to note, that not one single
task provides the data on which our results will rely, but that an array of
tasks are employed to understand (and confirm) the individual findings. The
proposed methods have already been tested among the target populations: Native
American and rural Majority Culture children of central
Applied tasks include (1) name generation; (2) reasoning tasks (3) Parent –
child speech dyads and (4) ethnographic description of classroom and curricula
content. These studies are important to: (1) establish a first approximation to
a more concise theory of the development of folkbiological models; (2) to
enhance our understanding of the formation and transformation of cultural
knowledge; (3) to assess the role culture and the environment plays in
elaborating these models and (4) in assessing the role of culture and expertise
in cognitive development.
This research is supported by the NIH and NSF.
Publications related to the Project:
Cognitive Development, Vol.18:25-47.