6.6 Cross-cultural differences in cognition as a function of practical imperatives.

The idea that societies differ in cultural practices is accepted by everyone. That these practices produce measurable differences in cognition including variable expertise in knowledge and cognitive strategies is also apparent. The contest is not really between accepting either cognitive style or cultural practices as the locus for the relationship between culture and cognition as both sources may indeed have a role to play (Cole & Parker, 2011; Greenfield, 2004; Mejia-Arauz, Rogoff, & Paradise, 2005). Studies cited above have demonstrated the presence of cultural differences in the frequencies in which participants engage in certain cultural practices connected to cognition.

Greenfield (2004) demonstrated how cognitive strategies changed as a result of historical alterations that made one type of learning (observation) obsolete and required more trial and error strategies. In his study he examined weaving practices among the Mayan culture in Mexico and the cognitive consequences of learning to weave as the community moved from a subsistence society where girls and women learned to weave the “right way” by observation of mothers and mentors, to more recent times when mothers were involved in a cash economy and weaved to sell. The study showed that in recent times learning to weave was often by self-correction and trial and error that produced more varied products. The pragmatic imperative in the cash economy was to create more products for sale that in turn created different cognitive strategies to meet the current need.

In the Mejia-Arauz et al study Mexican heritage children that came from homes of low education mothers learned as expected primarily by the cognitive strategy of observation. However, Mexican-American children from homes of mothers with higher education learned from verbal explanations producing a shift in cognitive practices that can be attributed to the mother’s education. The development of cognitive skills as a result of the use of cultural artifacts was supported in a study on the utilization of abacus in Japan. Participants learned to internalize the mental representations of the beads in order to increase speed of calculations (Hatano, 1997). The interiorizing of abacus calculation occurred from the frequency of practice demonstrating how cognitive expertise derives from sociocultural repetition. Of interest mental abacus also related to changes in neural performance of the posterior superior parietal cortex specialized for spatial and motor skills (Hanakawa, Honda, Okada, Fukuyama, & Shibasaki, 2003).

Still the connection between cultural practices and cognition does not invalidate cognitive styles as an explanatory tool since cognition also evolved out of the cultural experiences of entire cultural groups and cognitive styles assisted specifically in the adaptation of people to specific sociocultural environments. Therefore it remains valid to describe cognitive differences between cultural groups like East Asians and Western groups since cognitive style may have broad cultural and persuasive influences on thinking processes. Even where cultural practices change cognition as seen in the Hanakawa et al study such change still occur within the salient dominant thought processes that have evolved from the history of the cultural group. We must also acknowledge that cognition and culture are interdependent. It is culture that makes cognition possible by creation of artifacts. At the same time culture would not exist except for the cognition that engage and change the environment. Finally, we must acknowledge the role of biology, and that cultural practice produces neural changes in specific brain centers that are related to cognitive expertise.