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    Cole and Scribner Study

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    Schooling affects memory in cultural ways. Studies found that unschooled Liberian children showed little memory improvement with practice on free recall tasks using random word lists, unlike schooled children. However, when tasks were meaningful stories, their memory improved. Similarly, unschooled Mayan children performed poorly on free recall but well on tasks using familiar village objects. This suggests memory strategies are culturally specific rather than universal. Future cross-cultural memory research should use meaningful, culturally relevant tasks to avoid biases from formal schooling experiences.

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    Cole and Scribner Study

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    Schooling affects memory in cultural ways. Studies found that unschooled Liberian children showed little memory improvement with practice on free recall tasks using random word lists, unlike schooled children. However, when tasks were meaningful stories, their memory improved. Similarly, unschooled Mayan children performed poorly on free recall but well on tasks using familiar village objects. This suggests memory strategies are culturally specific rather than universal. Future cross-cultural memory research should use meaningful, culturally relevant tasks to avoid biases from formal schooling experiences.

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    Cole and Scribner Study (1)

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    Schooling affects memory in cultural ways. Studies found that unschooled Liberian children showed little memory improvement with practice on free recall tasks using random word lists, unlike schooled children. However, when tasks were meaningful stories, their memory improved. Similarly, unschooled Mayan children performed poorly on free recall but well on tasks using familiar village objects. This suggests memory strategies are culturally specific rather than universal. Future cross-cultural memory research should use meaningful, culturally relevant tasks to avoid biases from formal schooling experiences.

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    52 views6 pages

    Cole and Scribner Study

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    isaacwong620
    Schooling affects memory in cultural ways. Studies found that unschooled Liberian children showed little memory improvement with practice on free recall tasks using random word lists, unlike schooled children. However, when tasks were meaningful stories, their memory improved. Similarly, unschooled Mayan children performed poorly on free recall but well on tasks using familiar village objects. This suggests memory strategies are culturally specific rather than universal. Future cross-cultural memory research should use meaningful, culturally relevant tasks to avoid biases from formal schooling experiences.

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    of 6

    Lesson 6/7

    Discuss the effects of schooling on remembering


    DISCUSS how social or cultural factors affect one cognitive process

    What do we know about the effects of schooling on memory?

    You have this lesson to prepare for a semiar on the above topic. You will present in 2’s/3’s and should
    be able to talk for 10 minutes. You will then have up to 10 minutes for questioning. You should refer
    to your Course companion (80,81), the resources for this lesson and any other research you are able
    to find.

    Links to TOK
    Cross-cultural studies of memory

    In developmental psychology, one issue is the development of cognitive abilities such as memory.
    Most research has been done in the Western world, and an important Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget
    claimed that cognitive development followed universal laws. It has been assumed that memory tests
    could therefore be applied all over the world, and it was often found that participants in non-
    Western countries did poorly on many tests. However, in recent time cross-cultural studies of
    memories question the results of Western memory tests in non-Western settings. For example,
    and Scribner (1974) studied the development of memory among tribal people in rural Liberia. To
    overcome the barriers of language and culture, these researchers observed everyday cognitive
    activities before conducting their experiments and worked closely with the college-educated local
    people who acted as experimenters. Even with these precautions, they found striking cultural
    differences in the way tribal people went about remembering and solving the problems presented by
    their experimental tasks.

    The nature of these cultural differences can be seen in studies of the development of free-recall
    memory. In a free-recall task people are shown a large number of objects, one at a time, and then
    asked to remember them. This kind of memory is called "free" recall because people are free to
    recall the items in any order they wish.

    Below is a list of objects used in several of Cole's studies. The list shows that the objects appear to
    fall into four distinct categories. To make certain that American categories were not simply being
    imposed on Liberian reality, the researchers made preliminary investigations to ensure that Liberian
    participants were familiar with the items used and that they readily separated these items into the
    four groups indicated in the list.

    plate cutlass
    calabash hoe The word list used in research a number of
    pot knife times by Cole and his colleagues
    pan file
    cup hammer

    potato trousers
    onion singlet
    banana head tie
    orange shirt
    coconut hat

    The researchers found that unlike children in industrial societies, Liberian children showed no
    regular increase in memory perfonnance during middle childhood- unless they had attended school
    for several years. The nonschooled people improved their perfonnance on these tasks very little
    after the age of 9 or 10. These participants remembered approximatively ten items on the first trial,
    and managed to recall only two more items after 15 practice trials. The Liberian children who were
    attending school, by contrast, learned the materials rapidly, much the way schoolchildren of the
    same age did in the United States.
    hnportant clues to the causes of these differences were revealed by detailed analyses of the order in
    which the words were recalled. Schoolchildren in Liberia and the United States not only learned the
    list rapidly but used the categorical similarities of items in the list to aid their recall. After the first
    trial they clustered their responses, recalling for example items of clothing, then items of food, and
    so on. The nonschooled Liberian participants did very little such clustering, indicating that they
    were not using the categorical structure of the list to help them remember.

    To track down the source of this difference, the researchers varied aspects of the task. They found
    that if, instead of a list of objects presented in random order, the same objects were presented in a
    meaningful way as part of a story, their nonschooled Liberian participants recalled them easily,
    clustering the objects according to the roles they played in the story.

    Similar results have been found on tests of children's memorisation skills in research among Mayan
    people of rural Guatemala. When Mayan children were presented with a free-recall task, their
    performance lagged considerably behind those of age mates in the United States (Kagan et al.
    1979). Their performance changed dramatically, however, when Rogoff and Waddel (1982) gave
    them a memory task that was meaningful in local terms. The researchers constructed a diorama of a
    Mayan village located near a mountain and a lake, similar to the locale in which the children lived.
    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. Under these conditions, the memory performance of the Mayan
    children was slightly superior to that of their United States counterparts.

    The implication of these memory studies is that although the ability to remember is a universal
    intellectual requirement, specific forms of remembering are not universal, and the problem with
    many memory studies is that they are usually associated with formal schooling.

    Schooling presents children with specialised information-processing tasks, such as committing large
    amounts of information to memory in a short time, learning to manipulate abstract symbols in one's
    head and on paper, using logic to conduct experiments, and many more tasks that have few if any
    analogies in societies without formal schooling. The free-recall task that Cole and his colleagues
    originally used to assess memory among Liberian tribal people has no precise analogy in traditional
    Liberian cultures, so it is not surprising that the corresponding way of remembering would not be
    acquired. The same conclusion applies to a vast majority of tasks psychologists use to investigate
    various mental processes during childhood and in adulthood, because many of them embody forms
    of activity that are specific to certain kinds of settings, especially schools and the modem
    technological workplace-settings that only some cultures provide.

    Based on Cole and Cole (1993) The development a/Children. 2nd edition. Scientific
    American Books.
    Questions

    1. How does culture affect memory? Use the examples here and show it.
    2. What has been the problem in cross-cultural memory research, and what have the implications
    been?
    3. Give some arguments for why it is not advisable to assume that memory strategies are universal
    and support it with evidence.
    4. If you were to test memory in another culture, how would you proceed?
    5. What can be learned from these studies on memory on general problems in psychological
    research?
    Culture and Basic Psychological Processes - 149

    differences in sorting tasks and categorization are best attributed to differences


    in cultural heritage or to differences in formal schooling.' Future research on
    this topic is needed to sort these influences out and determine how culture and
    educational system jointly influence this cognitive process. Such research will
    also need to deal conceptually and empirically with the question of how cul-
    ture, itself represented in categories, relates to the process, function, and devel-
    opment of other mental categories.

    Culture and Memory


    Another basic intellectual task we all share is remembering things. We have all
    agonized over the task of memorizing for tests and experienced the difficulty of
    memorizing lists of dates or names or scientific terms. Whenever we can, we
    use memory aids, such as shopping lists and calendars, to help us remember
    things we are likely to forget.
    Many of us have heard the claim that individuals from nonliterate societies
    develop better memory skills because they don't have the ability to write things
    down to remember them (Bartlett, 1932). Is it true that our memories are not
    as good when we habitually use lists as aids in remembering? Ross and Millson
    (1970) suspected that reliance on an oral tradition might make people better at
    remembering. They compared the memories of American and Ghanian college
    II:
    students in remembering stories that were read aloud. They found that, gener-
    ally, the Ghanian students were better than the Americans at remembering the r
    " l'
    I
    It,
    stories. Thus, it seemed that cultures with an oral tradition were better at re-
    membering things. But Cole and his colleagues (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp,
    1971) found that nonliterate African subjects did not perform better when they
    II
    II
    !~
    '1'1
    were tested with lists of words instead of with stories. These findings suggest :

    that cultural differences in memory as a function of oral tradition may be lim-


    ited to meaningful material.
    One of the best-known aspects of memory, established by research in the
    United States, is the serial position effect. This effect suggests that we re-
    member things better if they are either the first (primacy effect) or last (recency
    effect) item in a list of things to remember. Interestingly, Cole and Scribner
    (1974) found no relation between serial position and the likelihood of being
    remembered in studying the memory of Kpelle tribespeople in Liberia.
    Wagner (1980) hypothesized that the primacy effect depends on re-
    hearsal-the silent repetition of things you are trying to remember-and that
    this memory strategy is related to schooling. Wagner compared groups of Mo-
    roccan children who had and had not gone to school and found that the pri-
    macy effect was much stronger in the children who had been to school.
    Wagner suggested that the process of memory has two parts: a "hardware"
    part, the basic limitation of memory, which does not change across cultures;
    and a "software" or programming part that has to do with how we go about
    trying to remember, which is learned. It is the software part that varies across
    cultures.
    150 • Chapter 6

    The ability to remember unconnected information appears to be influenced


    not so much by culture but by whether people have attended school. In a class-
    room setting, children are expected to memorize letters, multiplication tables,
    and other basic facts. Subjects who have been to school, therefore, have had
    more practice in memorizing than unschooled individuals. They are also able
    to apply these skills in test situations that resemble their school experience. A
    study by Scnoner (1914) with educated and uneducated Africans supported
    this idea. Educated Africans were able to recall lists of words to a degree simi-
    lar to that of American subjects, whereas uneducated Africans remembered
    fewer words. It is not clear whether culture or schooling or both contribute to
    the observed differences.
    Memory has interesting implications for a wide range of psychological phe-
    nomena, including the production of stereotypes. In one study (Bigler & Lilien,
    1993), for example, European American children were asked to recall stories
    about European or African Americans that were either consistent or inconsis-
    tent with racial stereotypes. Negative traits were associated with either the Eu-
    ropean or African American child in the stories. The results indicated that chil-
    dren with better memory for counter-stereotypic stories had lower degrees of
    racial stereotyping and greater ability to classify people along multiple dimen-
    sions. Memory, therefore, may affect stereotypes and the ways by which we un-
    derstand people.
    Despite cultural differences in memory ability (that may be mediated by ex-
    posure to formal educational systems), there may be some constants about
    memory' across cultures as well, particularly in the relationship between
    memory and aging. Studies have shown that memory abilities tend to decrease
    as people get older (or, at least people become more selective about what they
    remember!). One study showed that such memory decreases with age were con-
    sistent across cultures. In this study (Crook, Youngjohn, Larrabee, & Salama,
    1992), Belgian and American participants ranging in age from 14 to 88 years,
    were matched on gender and age and asked to perform computer-simulated ev-
    eryday memory tasks. They found that age-related memory decline was consis-
    tent in the two groups.
    The relationship between memory and oral traditions, and the possible
    influence of culture versus formal educational experiences on those tradi-
    tions, raises some interesting questions for our understanding of the effects
    of culture on memory. Oral traditions are not necessarily limited to cultures
    with no formal educational systems; they are evident in epics, ballads, and
    rhymes in many cultures, including our own. Oral traditions can thus tell us
    something about the workings of memory in any culture (Rubin, 1995). To
    add to the complexity of these issues, some studies in the anthropology of
    language have indicated that linguistic structures in written language depend
    on the practice of orality in the development of writing (for example, Patel,
    1996). Future research in this area, therefore, needs to cQntrol not only
    for the effects of education, but also for the cultural meanings of 'orality,
    written language, and the specific content of the thing being remembered. At

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