International Journal of Behavioral Development

The burden of the argument put forward in this paper is that in spite of a considerable expansion of cross-cultural development studies over the past two decades, developmental psychology as a whole remains unduly parochial. Since most of its theories originate in the first world, one of the main functions of cross-cultural work is to assess the range of their applicability across the globe. After briefly illustrating this theme in relation to infant behaviour, research and theories dealing with cognitive development in childhood and adolescence are reviewed in more detail. Piagetians focusing on supposedly universal processes appeared at one time sharply opposed to followers of Vygotsky concentrating on specific context-bound learning. Cross-cultural work has resulted in a convergence such that what divides them now is mainly a difference of emphasis, both sides accepting forms of 'local constructivism'.

Important contributions from workers outside these major traditions are outlined and a shift away from exclusive concern with learning to understand the physical, and towards the social world is noted. In conclusion, some evidence is mentioned indicating that cultural factors powerfully affect emotional as well as cognitive development and it is suggested that there is a need to devote more effort in that direction.

The present study is the first exploratory step of a larger investigation focusing on the influence of culturally-related caretaking practices on motor development. Four Bambara infants between 4 and 23 weeks of age were observed for two full days with a paper-and-pencil event-recording technique and with video films. We took down the infant's 'postural time-table', i.e., the different spatial positions experienced during everyday life (prone, supine, sitting, standing...) and the different postural adjustments required by maternal manipulations during caretaking and transportation.

Child rearing among the Gusii of Kenya is distinctive in that (a) infants are routinely cared for by both mothers and child caretakers, and (b) infant-mother interaction is primarily limited to activities which provide for the infant's physical needs, whereas infant-caretaker interaction is primarily limited to play and social activities. In this study a separation/reunion paradigm and Ainsworth classification procedures were used to assess security of attachment in a sample of Gusii infants 8 to 27 months of age. The proportion of infants classified as securely attached to mother and caretaker was 61% and 54%, respectively. Although the establishment of a secure relationship was not affected by differences between infant-mother and infant-caretaker activities, correlates of attachment security were specific to each. Whereas attachment to mother was related to nutritional status, attachment to the caretaker was related to Bayley MDI performance. These findings suggest that the pervasive association between security of attachment and infant functioning in American studies is a reflection of the diversity of activities in which infants and mothers engage.

In Germany and Italy 16 children (8 in each country) were observed during their first year in preschool. An average of 50 five-minutes samples in Germany and 38 in Italy were analysed with regard to certain play and behaviour categories.

The comparison revealed differences in 'looking around' and 'body contact' (both more in Italy), 'talking to somebody', 'automanipulation' (both more in Germany), and 'the number of children playing together' (German children preferred to play with more than one child, while Italian children played more often in dyads or alone).

In both cultures children preferred the same age children for social play and the same sex children for parallel play and showed a decline of 'interactions with the teacher' and 'looking around' over the year. Sex differences were found in both cultures for 'object conffict'.

To explore how children come to adopt cultural forms of representation, three studies are presented. Study 1 asks about children's ability to discriminate between 'younger' and 'older' pieces of work, with 'younger and 'older' distinguished on the basis of Developmental Drawing Status (Harris 1963). Study 2 asks about children's preferences and the extent to which they match those of teachers. Study 3 asks about the differences between drawings children produce for themselves and those they produce when asked by an adult for a 'good' drawing. The underlying assumption is that one condition influencing developmental change is children's exposure to work by adults or by older children. The results point to ways of combining cross-cultural comparisons of performances with monocultural work on processes underlying children's productions. They also raise questions about patterns of exposure in any cultural context and about factors involved in the development of discriminations, preferences, and audience expectations.

The traditional approach to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis looks at language and categorically different perception or interpretation of the environment. Another aspect of linguistic relativity relates language to the process of cognition itself, including the ease or facility of cognitive processes. With particular reference to the Chinese language and its unique orthography, some evidence for language-related differences in the manner of information processing is reviewed. These include visual form perception, manipulation of numbers, and memory versus manipulation and elaboration of verbal information. These differences have implications for cognitive development as well as cross-cultural testing and comparison.

School instruction about and daily practice with proportions problems were contrasted with respect to their influences upon students' and construction foremen's performance in a series of problems on scale drawings, which seem to entail the formal operational scheme of proportionality. Foremen's perfomance was more accurate than students' but a greater proportion of students used a generalizable problem-solving strategy of finding and working with a simplified ratio (l/x or x/l). The school-taught proportions algorithm (x/a = b/c) had no significant impact upon students' problem-solving strategies. Students' performance revealed a strong ability to deal with the rule-based aspects of the mathematics in the problem but their ability to deal with meaning was weak; in contrast, job experience seems to enrich measurement with meaning. These differences can be traced to the contexts in which problem solving had been practiced and are suggestive of an educational implication: schools have overlooked the importance of meaning in mathematics, a practice which makes students' performance appear lower than their reasoning skills would lead one to expect.

Anthropological approaches to human development have been oriented primarily to the socialized adult, at the expense of understanding developmental processes. Developmental psychology, in contrast, has traditionally been concerned with a decontextualized, 'universal' child. After a brief historical review, the 'developmental niche' is introduced as a framework for examining the cultural structuring of child development. The developmental niche has three components: the physical and social settings in which the child lives; the customs of child care and child rearing; and the psychology of the caretakers. Homeostatic mechanisms tend to keep the three subsystems in harmony with each other and appropriate to the developmental level and individual characteristics of the child. Nevertheless, they have different relationships to other features of the larger environment and thus constitute somewhat independent routes of disequilibrium and change. Regularities within and among the subsystems, and thematic continuities and progressions across the niches of childhood provide material from which the child abstracts the social, affective, and cognitive rules of the culture. Examples are provided from research in a farming community in Kenya.