Educating attention - The emergence of cultural differences in attentional styles
Final Report Abstract
The overarching goals of this project were, first, to provide evidence for the emergence of cross-cultural differences in children’s attention styles during early childhood, and, second, to test the assumption that verbal attention guidance is one of the mechanisms underlying differential development between 4 and 9 years of age. To test these two assumptions, this project followed a convergent evidence approach and consisted of a series of three studies: a cross-cultural study (Study 1) describing similarities and differences in children’s attention style and caregivers’ attention guidance across age (4-5, 6-7, and 8-9-year-olds) and three cultural contexts, a priming study (Study 2) and a training study (Study 3) that both tested the effectiveness of different language primes (holistic vs. analytic condition) in affecting children’s visual attention under experimentally controlled conditions. The main findings of this project are the following: (i) caregivers verbally guide their children’s attention in culturally accentuated ways as mothers from Münster more often focus on the object than mothers from Kyoto and Cotacachi (Study 1). Although mothers’ verbal attention guidance was not significantly associated with the development of children’s visual attention style, we found that verbal attention guidance was effective in influencing children’s visual attention both (ii) from a short-term (Study 2), and (iii) a longer-term (Study 3) perspective. Thus, overall this project supports the assumption that verbal attention guidance plays a causal role in the socialization of visual attention styles. However, our results also revealed a mixed picture concerning cross-cultural differences observed in mothers and children, as well as the consistency of context-sensitivity measures. Thus, a key challenge for future research is the development of ecologically more valid methods in order to extend the socio-cultural scope of the research line on analytic and holistic attention and to reflect these multi-factorial cultural processes in their complexity and in a culturally fair way.
Publications
- (2021). The effect of verbal priming of visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children. Cognition. 212:104681
Jurkat, S., Gruber, M., & Kärtner, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104681) - (2022). Cultural similarities and differences in explaining others’ behavior in 4- to 9-year-old children from three cultural contexts. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
Jurkat, S., Iza Simba, N. B., Hernández Chacón, L., Itakura, S., & Kärtner, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221221098423)
