Foreign-language effects in cross-cultural behavioral research: Evidence from the Tanzanian Hadza.

Behavioral research in traditional subsistence populations is often conducted in a non-native language. Recent studies show that non-native language-use systematically influences behavior, including in widely used methodologies. However, such studies are largely conducted in rich, industrialized societies, using at least one European language. This study expands sample diversity. We presented four standard tasks-a "dictator" game, two sacrificial dilemmas, a wager task, and five Likert-risk tolerance measures-to 129 Hadza participants. We randomly varied study languages-Hadzane and Kiswahili-between participants. We report a moderate impact of study language on wager decisions, alongside a substantial effect on dilemma decisions and responses to Likert-assessments of risk. As expected, non-native languages fostered utilitarian choices in sacrificial dilemmas. Unlike previous studies, non-native-language-use decreased risk preference in wager and Likert-tasks. We consider alternative explanatory mechanisms to account for this reversal, including linguistic relativity and cultural context. Given the strength of the effects reported here, we recommend, where possible, that future cross-cultural research should be conducted in participants' first language.

Explaining and exploring the dynamics of parent-child interactions and children's causal reasoning at a children's museum exhibit.

This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One-hundred-nine parent-child dyads (3-6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian-American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported) played at an air flow exhibit with a nonobvious causal mechanism. Children's causal reasoning was probed afterward. The timing of parents' explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors was related to children's systematic exploration during play. Children's exploratory behavior, and parents' goal setting during play, were related to children's subsequent causal reasoning. These findings support the hypothesis that children's exploration is related to both internal learning processes and external social scaffolding.

Quantifying quality: The impact of measures of school quality on children's academic achievement across diverse societies.

Recent decades have seen a rapid acceleration in global participation in formal education, due to worldwide initiatives aimed to provide school access to all children. Research in high income countries has shown that school quality indicators have a significant, positive impact on numeracy and literacy-skills required to participate in the increasingly globalized economy. Schools vary enormously in kind, resources, and teacher training around the world, however, and the validity of using diverse school quality measures in populations with diverse educational profiles remains unclear. First, we assessed whether children's numeracy and literacy performance across populations improves with age, as evidence of general school-related learning effects. Next, we examined whether several school quality measures related to classroom experience and composition, and to educational resources, were correlated with one another. Finally, we examined whether they were associated with children's (4-12-year-olds, N = 889) numeracy and literacy performance in 10 culturally and geographically diverse populations which vary in historical engagement with formal schooling. Across populations, age was a strong positive predictor of academic achievement. Measures related to classroom experience and composition were correlated with one another, as were measures of access to educational resources and classroom experience and composition. The number of teachers per class and access to writing materials were key predictors of numeracy and literacy, while the number of students per classroom, often linked to academic achievement, was not. We discuss these results in the context of maximising children's learning environments and highlight study limitations to motivate future research. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We examined the extent to which four measures of school quality were associated with one another, and whether they predicted children's academic achievement in 10 culturally and geographically diverse societies. Across populations, measures related to classroom experience and composition were correlated with one another as were measures of access to educational resources to classroom experience and composition. Age, the number of teachers per class, and access to writing materials were key predictors of academic achievement across populations. Our data have implications for designing efficacious educational initiatives to improve school quality globally.

Revisiting an extant framework: Concerns about culture and task generalization.

The target article elaborates upon an extant theoretical framework, "Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning." We raise three major concerns: (1) There is limited discussion of cross-cultural universality and variation; (2) overgeneralization of overimitation and omission of other social learning types; and (3) selective imitation in infants and toddlers is not discussed.

Cognitive flexibility supports the development of cumulative cultural learning in children.

The scale of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is a defining characteristic of humans. Despite marked scientific interest in CCE, the cognitive underpinnings supporting its development remain understudied. We examined the role cognitive flexibility plays in CCE by studying U.S. children's (N = 167, 3-5-year-olds) propensity to relinquish an inefficient solution to a problem in favor of a more efficient alternative, and whether they would resist reverting to earlier versions. In contrast to previous work with chimpanzees, most children who first learned to solve a puzzlebox in an inefficient way switched to an observed, more efficient alternative. However, over multiple task interactions, 85% of children who switched reverted to the inefficient method. Moreover, almost all children in a control condition (who first learned the efficient method) switched to the inefficient method. Thus, children were keen to explore an alternative solution but, like chimpanzees, are overall conservative in reverting to their first-learned one.

Contributions of causal reasoning to early scientific literacy.

Although early causal reasoning has been studied extensively, inconsistency in the tasks used to assess it has clouded our understanding of its structure, development, and relevance to broader developmental outcomes. The current research attempted to bring clarity to these questions by exploring patterns of performance across several commonly used measures of causal reasoning, and their relation to scientific literacy, in a sample of 3- to 5-year-old children from diverse backgrounds (N = 153). A longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis revealed that some measures of causal reasoning (counterfactual reasoning, causal learning, and causal inference), but not all of them (tracking cause-effect associations and resolving confounded evidence), assess a unidimensional factor and that this resulting factor was relatively stable across time. A cross-lagged panel model analysis revealed associations between causal reasoning and scientific literacy across each age tested. Causal reasoning and scientific literacy related to each other concurrently, and each predicted the other in subsequent years. These relations could not be accounted for by children's broader cognitive skills. Implications for early STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) engagement and success are discussed.

Still-face redux: Infant responses to a classic and modified still-face paradigm in proximal and distal care cultures.

Literature on infant emotion is dominated by research conducted in Western, industrialized societies where early socialization is characterized by face-to-face, vocal communication with caregivers. There is a dearth of knowledge of infant emotion in the context of social interaction outside of the visual and vocal modalities. In a three-population cross-cultural comparison, we used the still-face task to measure variation in behavior among infants from proximal care (practicing high levels of physical contact) communities in Bolivia and distal care (emphasizing vocal and visual interaction) communities in the U.S. and Fiji. In a modified version of the face-to-face still-face (FFSF), Study 1, infants in the U.S. and Fiji displayed the typical behavioral response to the still-face episode: increased negative affect and decreased social engagement, whereas infants in Bolivia showed no change. For tactile behavior, infants in Bolivia showed an increase in tactile self-stimulation from the interaction episode to the still-face episode, whereas U.S. infants showed no change. In Study 2, we created a novel body-to-body version of the still-face paradigm ("still-body") with infants in US and Bolivia, to mimic the near-constant physical contact Bolivian infants experience. The U.S. and Bolivian infant response was similar to Study 1: US infants showed decreased positive affect and increased negative affect and decreased social engagement from the interaction to the still-body episode and Bolivian infants showed no change. Notably, there were overall differences in infant behaviors between the two paradigms (FFSF and Still-Body). Infants in Bolivia and the U.S. showed increased positive facial affect during the FFSF paradigm in comparison with the Still-Body paradigm. Our results demonstrate the need for more globally representative developmental research and a broader approach to infant emotion and communication.

Examining relations between performance on non-verbal executive function and verbal self-regulation tasks in demographically-diverse populations.

Self-regulation is a widely studied construct, generally assumed to be cognitively supported by executive functions (EFs). There is a lack of clarity and consensus over the roles of specific components of EFs in self-regulation. The current study examines the relations between performance on (a) a self-regulation task (Heads, Toes, Knees Shoulders Task) and (b) two EF tasks (Knox Cube and Beads Tasks) that measure different components of updating: working memory and short-term memory, respectively. We compared 107 8- to 13-year-old children (64 females) across demographically-diverse populations in four low and middle-income countries, including: Tanna, Vanuatu; Keningau, Malaysia; Saltpond, Ghana; and Natal, Brazil. The communities we studied vary in market integration/urbanicity as well as level of access, structure, and quality of schooling. We found that performance on the visuospatial working memory task (Knox Cube) and the visuospatial short-term memory task (Beads) are each independently associated with performance on the self-regulation task, even when controlling for schooling and location effects. These effects were robust across demographically-diverse populations of children in low-and middle-income countries. We conclude that this study found evidence supporting visuospatial working memory and visuospatial short-term memory as distinct cognitive processes which each support the development of self-regulation.

Facilitating behavioral change: A comparative assessment of ASHA efficacy in rural Bihar.

Community health worker (CHW) programs are essential for expanding health services to many areas of the world and improving uptake of recommended behaviors. One of these programs, called Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), was initiated by the government of India in 2005 and now has a workforce of about 1 million. ASHAs primarily focus on improving maternal and child health but also support other health initiatives. Evaluations of ASHA efficacy have found a range of results, from negative, to mixed, to positive. Clarity in forming a general impression of ASHA efficacy is hindered by the use of a wide range of evaluation criteria across studies, a lack of comparison to other sources of behavioral influence, and a focus on a small number of behaviors per study. We analyze survey data for 1,166 mothers from Bihar, India, to assess the influence of ASHAs and eight other health influencers on the uptake of 12 perinatal health behaviors. We find that ASHAs are highly effective at increasing the probability that women self-report having practiced biomedically-recommended behaviors. The ASHA's overall positive effect is larger than any of the nine health influencer categories in our study (covering public, private, and community sources), but their reach needs to be more widely extended to mothers who lack sufficient contact with ASHAs. We conclude that interactions between ASHAs and mothers positively impact the uptake of recommended perinatal health behaviors. ASHA training and program evaluation need to distinguish between individual-level and program-level factors in seeking ways to remove barriers that affect the reach of ASHA services.

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.

Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the improvement of cultural traits over generations via social transmission, is widely believed to be unique to humans. The capacity to build upon others' knowledge, technologies, and skills has produced the most diverse and sophisticated technological repertoire in the animal kingdom. Yet, inconsistency in both the definitions and criteria used to determine CCE and the methodology used to examine it across studies may be hindering our ability to determine which aspects are unique to humans. Issues regarding how improvement is defined and measured and whether some criteria are empirically testable are of increasing concern to the field. In this article, we critically assess the progress made in the field and current points of debate from conceptual and methodological perspectives. We discuss how inconsistency in definitions is detrimental to our ability to document potential evidence of CCE to nonhuman animals. We build on Mesoudi and Thornton's (2018) recently described core and extended CCE criteria to make specific recommendations about, from a comparative lens, which criteria should be used as evidence of CCE. We evaluate existing data from both wild and captive studies of nonhuman animals using these suggestions. We finish by discussing issues currently faced by researchers studying CCE in nonhuman animals, particularly nonhuman primates, and provide suggestions that may overcome these concerns and move the field forward. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures.

How do concepts of mental life vary across cultures? By asking simple questions about humans, animals and other entities - for example, 'Do beetles get hungry? Remember things? Feel love?' - we reconstructed concepts of mental life from the bottom up among adults (N = 711) and children (ages 6-12 years, N = 693) in the USA, Ghana, Thailand, China and Vanuatu. This revealed a cross-cultural and developmental continuity: in all sites, among both adults and children, cognitive abilities travelled separately from bodily sensations, suggesting that a mind-body distinction is common across diverse cultures and present by middle childhood. Yet there were substantial cultural and developmental differences in the status of social-emotional abilities - as part of the body, part of the mind or a third category unto themselves. Such differences may have far-reaching social consequences, whereas the similarities identify aspects of human understanding that may be universal.

An Infant Carrier Intervention and Breastfeeding Duration: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

OBJECTIVES: Parent-infant skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth increases initiation and duration of bodyfeeding. We hypothesized that providing ergonomic carriers to parents during pregnancy would increase the likelihood of breastfeeding and expressed human milk feeding through the first 6 months of life. METHODS: A randomized two-arm, parallel-group trial was conducted between February 2018 and June 2019 in collaboration with a home-visiting program in a low-income community. At 30 weeks' gestation, 50 parents were randomly assigned to receive an ergonomic infant carrier and instruction on proper use to facilitate increased physical contact with infants (intervention group), and 50 parents were assigned to a waitlist control group. Feeding outcomes were assessed with online surveys at 6 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months postpartum. RESULTS: Parents in the intervention group were more likely to be breastfeeding or feeding expressed human milk at 6 months (68%) than control group parents (40%; P = .02). No significant differences were detected in feeding outcomes at 6 weeks (intervention: 78% versus control: 81%, P = .76) or 3 months (intervention: 66% versus control: 57%, P = .34). Exclusive human milk feeding did not differ between groups (intervention versus control at 6 weeks: 66% vs 49%, P = .20; 3 months: 45% vs 40%, P = .59; 6 months: 49% vs 26%, P = .06). CONCLUSIONS: Infant carriers increased rates of breastfeeding and expressed human milk feeding at 6 months postpartum. Large-scale studies are warranted to further examine the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of providing carriers as an intervention to increase access to human milk.

Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths.

Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit-such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as "porous," or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become "absorbed" in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits.

Young children's metacognitive awareness of confounded evidence.

Young children selectively explore confounded evidence-when causality is ambiguous due to multiple candidate causes. This suggests that they have an implicit understanding that confounded evidence is uninformative. This study examined explicit understanding, or metacognitive awareness, of the informativeness of different qualities of evidence during early childhood. In two within-participants conditions, children (N = 60 5- and 6-year-olds) were presented with confounded and unconfounded evidence and were asked to evaluate and explain their knowledge of a causal relation. Children more frequently requested further information in the confounded condition than in the unconfounded condition. Nearly half of them referred to multiple candidate causes when explaining confounded evidence. Our data demonstrate that young children can reason explicitly about the informativeness of different kinds of evidence.

Tradition, taste and taboo: the gastroecology of maternal perinatal diet.

BACKGROUND: Maternal malnutrition is a major source of regional health inequity and contributes to maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. Bihar, a state in eastern India adjacent to Jharkhand and West Bengal, has relatively high neonatal mortality rates because a large portion of infants are born to young mothers. Bihar has the second-highest proportion of underweight children under 3 in India, with infant mortality rates of 48 per 1000 live births. Maternal malnutrition remains a major threat to perinatal health in Bihar, where 58.3% of pregnant women are anaemic. METHODS: We examined dietary beliefs and practices among mothers, mothers-in-law and community members, including Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), using focus group discussions (n=40 groups, 213 participants), key informant interviews (n=50 participants) and quantitative surveys (n=1200 recent mothers and 400 community health workers). We report foods that are added/avoided during the perinatal period, along with stated reasons underlying food choice. We summarise the content of the diet based on responses to the quantitative survey and identify influencers of food choice and stated explanations for adding and avoiding foods. KEY FINDINGS: Analyses for all methodologies included gathering frequency counts and running descriptive statistics by food item, recommendation to eat or avoid, pregnancy or post partum, food group and health promoting or risk avoiding. During pregnancy, commonly added foods were generally nutritious (milk, pulses) with explanations for consuming these foods related to promoting health. Commonly avoided foods during pregnancy were also nutritious (wood apples, eggplant) with explanations for avoiding these foods related to miscarriage, newborn appearance and issues with digestion. Post partum, commonly added foods included sweets because they ease digestion whereas commonly avoided foods included eggplants and oily or spicy foods. Family, friends, relatives or neighbours influenced food choice for both mothers and ASHAs more than ASHAs and other health workers.Perinatal dietary beliefs and behaviours are shaped by local gastroecologies or systems of knowledge and practice that surround and inform dietary choices, as well as how those choices are explained and influenced. Our data provide novel insight into how health influencers operating within traditional and biomedical health systems shape the perinatal dietary beliefs of both mothers and community health workers.

Toddlers, Tools, and Tech: The Cognitive Ontogenesis of Innovation.

The development of tool innovation presents a paradox. How do humans have such diverse and complex technology, ranging from smartphones to aircraft, and yet young children find even simple tool innovation challenges, such as fashioning a hook to retrieve a basket from a tube, remarkably difficult? We propose that the solution to this paradox is the cognitive ontogenesis of tool innovation. Using a common measure of children's tool innovation, we describe how multiple cognitive mechanisms work in concert at each step of its process: recognizing the problem, generating appropriate solutions, and the social transmission of innovations. We discuss what the ontogeny of this skill tells us about cognitive and cultural evolution and provide recommendations for future research.

Relations between parent-child interaction and children's engagement and learning at a museum exhibit about electric circuits.

Play is critical for children's learning, but there is significant disagreement over whether and how parents should guide children's play. The objective of the current study was to examine how parent-child interaction affected children's engagement and problem-solving behaviors when challenged with similar tasks. Parents and 4- to 7-year-old children in the U.S. (N = 111 dyads) played together at an interactive electric circuit exhibit in a children's museum. We examined how parents and children set and accomplished goals while playing with the exhibit materials. Children then participated in a set of challenges that involved completing increasingly difficult circuits. Children whose parents set goals for their interactions showed less engagement with the challenge task (choosing to attempt fewer challenges), and children whose parents were more active in completing the circuits while families played with the exhibit subsequently completed fewer challenges on their own. We discuss these results in light of broader findings on the role of parent-child interaction in museum settings.

Teaching Through Collaboration: Flexibility and Diversity in Caregiver-Child Interaction Across Cultures.

Teaching supports the high-fidelity transmission of knowledge and skills. This study examined similarities and differences in caregiver teaching practices in the United States and Vanuatu (N = 125 caregiver and 3- to 8-year-old child pairs) during a collaborative problem-solving task. Caregivers used diverse verbal and nonverbal teaching practices and adjusted their behaviors in response to task difficulty and child age in both populations. U.S. caregivers used practices consistent with a direct active teaching style typical of formal education, including guiding children's participation, frequent praise, and facilitation. In contrast, Ni-Vanuatu caregivers used practices associated with informal education and divided tasks with children based on difficulty. The implications of these findings for claims about the universality and diversity of caregiver teaching are discussed.

Cultural Variation in the Development of Beliefs About Conservation.

Examining variation in reasoning about sustainability between diverse populations provides unique insight into how group norms surrounding resource conservation develop. Cultural institutions, such as religious organizations and formal schools, can mobilize communities to solve collective challenges associated with resource depletion. This study examined conservation beliefs in a Western industrialized (Austin, Texas, USA) and a non-Western, subsistence agricultural community (Tanna, Vanuatu) among children, adolescents, and adults (N = 171; n = 58 7-12-year-olds, n = 53 13-17-year-olds, and n = 60 18-68-year-olds). Participants endorsed or rejected four types of justifications for engaging in land and animal conservation: sustainability, moral, religious, or permissible. In both populations, participants endorsed sustainability justifications most frequently. Religious justifications increased with age in Tanna and decreased with age in Austin. Tannese participants were also more likely to endorse multiple justifications for conservation than Austin participants. Data across all justification types show a main effect of age in both communities; endorsement of conservation decreased with age in Austin, but increased with age in Tanna. Across age groups, participants were more likely to endorse the conservation of animals than land in Austin, yet equally as likely to endorse the conservation of land and animals in Tanna. Overall, these results reveal similarities and differences in the beliefs that support the conservation of natural resources across populations.