Effects of Culture on Cognition/Behaviour

culture

a dynamic system of rules, explicit and implicit, established by groups in order to ensure their survival, involving attitudes, values, beliefs, norms and behaviours

culture’s effect on memory

the way cultural experiences, values and practices influence how people encode, store, and recall information

cultural groups

groups of people who share similar cultural values, beliefs, traditions, practices or ways of life

Kearins (1981) - Aim

To investigate whether Aboriginal children perform better on visual spatial memory tasks compared to non-Aboriginal children due to their cultural upbringing in the Australian desert environment, which emphasises navigation and visual memory for survival

Kearins - Method

44 adolescent desert Indigenous Australians aged 12-16, 44 Australian adolescents; quasi-experiment, matched pairs design, convenience sampling

Kearins - Procedure

• 4 variations of the task

  • Artificial different (A/D): 20 man-made objects

  • Natural different (N/D): 20 naturally occurring objects

  • Artificial same (A/S): 12 varying small bottles

  • Natural same (N/S): 12 varying small rocks

• Participants were asked to study the board for 30 seconds before they were heaped into the centre and covered

• Children were asked to replace the items in their original locations

Kearins - Results

• On all four variations, Indigenous Australians performed better than white children

• Least difference in A/D

• Indigenous Australians showed no significant difference between artificial and natural tasks

Kearins - Conclusion

The survival of the Indigenous Australians in the harsh desert landscape has encouraged and rewarded their ability to store or encode information using visual retrieval cues, suggesting that survival needs may shape and reward a particular way of encoding information in memory

Kearins - Link

• Demonstrates an effect of culture on memory, showing how different cultural and environmental experiences may influence the development and use of visual-spatial memory

• Differences in groups suggest that cultural environment can influence the cognitive strategies individuals develop and use when remembering information