Culture and Cognition: Developmental Perspectives Introduction

The interest in the role of culture for understanding human cognitive processes is long standing and goes back to the beginnings of modern (cross) cultural psychology. However, perspectives, topics, and emphases are varied and change over time. For a long time, the major interest-as in cross-cultural psychology in-general-consisted in demonstrating similarity, if not even universality, of cognitive processes across cultural environments. Therefore, for much of the 20th century, most psychologists assumed that all normal human beings were equipped with the same set of attentional, perceptual, memorial, learning, and inferential procedures. In particular, Piaget's stages of development were sought to be (re-) confirmed on a cross-cultural scale (Dasen, 1984). However, the results revealed that there is a high contextual dependency of cognitive achievements, particularly in terms of abstract, context--independent, analytical competences that Piaget had defined as formal-operations in the final stage of the development of intelligence. Especially, the level of formal education or schooling in general and familiarity with tasks and material exerted substantial influences on analytical competences (Dasen, Ngini, & Lavallie, 1979; LeVine, Miller, R-ichman, & LeVine, 1996; Serpell, 1993).