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Children across cultures see same and different natural world |
| TheAllINeed.com |
(NC&T/NU) Children, by four or five, whether they grow up in the heart of a U.S. city or in a far-off rural area of the world show strong universal patterns in the most fundamental notions about the natural world, said Sandra Waxman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
Waxman, recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a 2007-08 James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship, is writing a book that will synthesize findings from an interdisciplinary research project on notions about the natural world. She is directing the project with Douglas Medin, professor of psychology at Northwestern.
"Our research shows that children come into the world ready to form concepts such as 'living thing,' 'animal,' 'plant' and 'human,'" Waxman said. "Within their first years, children from across the world's communities will spontaneously form concepts about the objects and events they encounter and will use these concepts as a foundation upon which they add knowledge about the world around them."
The research also offers striking examples of how children's basic concepts and organization of knowledge are affected by their cultural environments. One of the major focuses of Waxman's research is how infants' strong cognitive capacities are fine-tuned by language and culture.
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English-speaking children, for example, take considerably longer than Maya children raised in Mexico and Indonesian children living in urban Jakarta to comprehend that plants are "alive."
The Maya and, by six or seven, the Indonesian-speaking children understand that plants and animals are "alive." But the English-speaking children, whether raised in rural Wisconsin, urban Chicago or suburban Evanston (a relatively well educated community), have difficulty understanding that plants, like animals, are "alive."
The research finds that roughly 50 percent of the nine- and 10-year-old English-speaking children studied agree that plants are "alive," according to Waxman.
"Basically majority culture children in the United States learn, directly or indirectly, that they are the pinnacle of the natural world whereas the Maya and Indonesian children learn that they merely are a part of the natural world," said Waxman. "The cultural differences are significant, and they help explain why English-speaking children have such difficulty understanding that plants, too, should be seen as living."
Waxman found that children in each of the populations appreciate the overarching and rather abstract core concept of living things, but the scope of the concept is "tuned up" by their linguistic and cultural communities.
"Ultimately our beliefs about the natural world and the relations among plants, humans and non-humans serve as the bedrock upon which we base our actions," said Waxman. "And no doubt young children's concepts bear the imprint of community-wide discourse and belief systems."
The extensive research program directed by Waxman and Medin includes psychologists, linguists and anthropologists who are studying young children and adults from a range of language and cultural communities, including urban and rural U.S. English speakers from majority culture and Native American populations.
The researchers also are comparing how majority culture and Native American populations perceive humans in the universe of living things. Extensive research in developmental psychology suggests that children's early conceptions of the natural world are strongly anthropocentric. But this proclivity toward anthropocentrism is not universal.
In the United States, children's books, movies and songs often feature anthropocentric images of non-human animals, such as Richard Scary's multitude of creatures with human characteristics and the much beloved "Bambi." In contrast, Native American communities see humans as intricate participants in the living world. Anthropocentrism is less prevalent in parent-child discourse.
The research suggests that anthropocentrism of young urban children not only is a byproduct of their more limited exposure to the natural world, but also is a result of what is passed on by adults in their community.
Waxman's interest in how innate capacities are fine-tuned by the environment is at the center of her research on early language and conceptual development in infants and toddlers at Northwestern University's Project on Child Development as well as on her cross-cultural research on notions of the natural world.
"My work largely is devoted to infants and young children from diverse cultures, because they are the only ones who can answer questions concerning the origin and evolution of knowledge," Waxman said. "In my view, these are the most exciting questions in cognitive science today."
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| About the Author |
©2006 All rights reserved
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| Quotes | Figures wont lie, but liars will figure.
General Charles H. Grosvenor.
He thought the formula for water was H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O (H-to-O).
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts — for support rather than illumination. — Andrew Lang.
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