Cross Cultural studies of memory

1. Cross Cultural studies of memory • It is probably no surprise that memory and other cognitive processes are influenced by the cultural context in which people live. Humans face different challenges around the world in order to survive. This was particularly true before our modern era. • After industrialization and the development of technology – there has been a growing need for people with specialized education. The education systems reflect this. Think about how much you need to learn, understand and memorize, whether it be in mathematics, languages, or psychology. You also need to learn how to organize information in your memory, and how to retrieve the appropriate knowledge from your memory when you need it. This type of education is a part of our culture. • According to the US Psychologist Jerome Bruner (1960), children of any culture can learn the basics of culture through school and daily interaction with the people they live with. Parents, grandparents, friends, peers, siblings, and teachers are amongst the most important in the transmission of knowledge, be it formal or informal.

2. Cultural studies of memory • Cognitive psychologists have traditionally carried out research in western countries. If one assumes that cognitive processes follow universal laws, then all humans all over the world, regardless of culture, would perform the same cognitive tasks with the same results. • Following this logic, the same memory test could be applied globally. However, this is not the case. When researchers from the west performed test with participants in non-western countries, the found that they did poorly on many memory tests. • This was not always interpreted correctly – that is, there was a western bias in the tests and it was therefore not valid when applied in another culture. • Cross cultural psychologists are now aware that if you want to test memory in a group of people, it is necessary to have an insight into the language and culture of the group – the testing method must be embedded/contextualized in the culture.

3. Cole & Scribner’s (1974) cross-cultural study of memory strategies in different cultures • Cole & Scribner (1974) aimedto investigate memory strategies in different cultures. • For their procedure, they compared recall of a series of words in the US and among the Kpelle people of rural Liberia, in West Africa. The researchers were aware that they could not use the same list of words in the two countries, so they started by observing everyday cognitive activities in Liberia. This helped them to develop memory experiments with relevant tasks, in close collaboration with the local college educated people who spoke the language and acted as experimenters. • They also made sure that the words they used in the memory experiments were familiar to the participants.

4. Cole & Scribner’s (1974) cross cultural study of memory strategies in different cultures • In spite of these precautions, their findings showed striking cultural differences in the way the Kpelle people went about remembering and solving the problems presented in the experiments. • In their first study the researchers asked Liberian children from different age groups to recall as many items as possible from four categories: Utensils, Clothes, Tools and Vegetables.

5. Normally, one would expect that the older children would recall more items after practice, but the researchers found that this was not the case unlessthe children had attended schoolfor several years. • The non-schooled children did not improve their performance on free recall tasks after the age of 10. They remembered around 10 items the first time, and after 15 trials they only remembered two more items. • On the other hand, children who had attended school learned the lists just as rapidly as the children in the US, and they used a similar strategy to recall, based on the categorical similarity of the objects. Cole & Scribner’s (1974) cross cultural study of memory strategies in different cultures

6. Cole & Scribner’s (1974) cross cultural study of memory strategies in different cultures • When researchers analyzed the data, the found that illiterate (non schooled) children did not use strategies such as chunking – grouping bits of information into larger units, to help them remember. They also found that the Kpelle did not appear to apply any rehearsal, as the position in the word list did not have an effect on the rate of recall (no serial position effect). • In their second study, the researchers varied the recall task so that the objects were now presented in a meaningful way as part of a story. This is called a narrative. • They found that the illiterate (non schooled) children recalled the objects easily and actually chunked them according to the roles they played in the story. The results have been supported by other cross cultural studies on children's memorizations skills such as Rogoff and Waddell (1982).

7. Rogoff and Waddell’s (1982) cross cultural study of memory with Mayan and US children • Rogoff and Waddell (1982) aimedto investigate cross cultural differences between Mayan children and those from the US. Other studies had found that Mayan children performed poorer on memory tasks than those from the US, so Rogoff and Waddell (1982) wanted to see if their performance improved when they where given a memory task that was meaningful in local terms. Their sample was 30 US children and 30 Mayan children from Guatemala. • For their procedure, the researchers constructed a diorama ( a 3D miniature scene) of a Mayan village located near a mountain and a lake, similar to the place in which the children lived. They also constructed a diorama of a scene in the US for the American children (from salt lake city).

8. Rogoff and Waddell’s (1982) cross cultural study of memory with Mayan and US children • Each child watched as a local experimenter selected 20 miniature objects from a set of 80 and placed them in the diorama. The objects included cars, animals, people, and furniture-just the kind of things that would be found in a real town. • Then the 20 objects were returned to the group of 60 others remaining on the table. After a few minutes, the children were asked to reconstruct the full scene they had been shown. • Their findings were, that under these conditions, the memory performance of the Mayan children was slightly superior to that of their United States counterparts. They concluded that children of any culture are skilled at remembering if information is presented in a meaningful context.

9. Research into Culture & Memory: Conclusions: • Memory studies like these invite reflection. It seems that even though the ability to remember is universal, strategies for remembering are not universal. • It is therefore a problem that many traditional memory studies are associated with cultures where formal schooling has taken place. • Generally, schooling presents children with a number of specialized information processing tasks, such as organizing large amounts of symbols in problem solving. This is a part of our modern culture, and a necessity in western society. • It is questionable whether such ways of remembering have parallels in traditional societies like the Kpelle or Mayan children in Guatemala. Their traditional culture does not place emphasis on these skills, so they don’t perform as well on tests where they are required. However, when memory tasks are contextualized, performance increases. • The conclusion is that people learn to remember in ways that are relevant for their everyday lives, and these do not always mirror the tasks that western cognitive psychologist s use to investigate mental processes.