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Many discussions of the difference between Vygotsky and Piaget focus on the proximal locus of development. For Piaget it is said to be in individual children, who construct knowledge through their actions on the world; for Vygotsky it is said to be in social processes. A more appropriate way to distinguish between them has to do with the role attributed to cultural mediation. Mediation of human action by cultural artifacts played a central role in Vygotsky’s account of human development, but was much less important for Piaget. Claims regarding the social origins of individual mental processes in Vygotsky’s account need to be understood in light of his claims regarding how artifacts mediate social and individual functioning.

The author's intellectual movement over the past two decades, from cross-cultural experimental psychology to the cultural psychology of mediation of human activities and cognitive processes, is described in this paper. Productive use of the concept of culture in psychology entails conceptualization of the future and the past in the present, and taking a process-based look at human activities. Cultural mediation in the case of reading is described. The emphasis on the emergent psychological processes as being culturally constituted leads to the need to explore novel paths in reconstructing psychology's methodology.

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ERHAPS the most prevalent view of the source of ethnic and social class differences in intellectual performance is what might be summed up under the label "the deficit hypothesis." It can be stated briefly, without risk of gross exaggeration. It rests on the assumption that a community under conditions of poverty (for it is the poor who are the focus of attention, and a disproportionate number of the poor are members of minority ethnic groups) is a disorganized community, and this disorganization expresses itself in various forms of deficit. One widely agreedupon source of deficit is mothering; the child of poverty is assumed to lack adequate parental attention. Given the illegitimacy rate in the urban ghetto, the most conspicuous "deficit" is a missing father and, consequently, a missing father model. The mother is away at work or, in any case, less involved with raising her children than she should be by white middle-class standards. There is said to be less regularity, less mutuality in interaction with her. There are said to be specialized deficits in interaction as well-less guidance in goal seeking from the parents (Schoggen, 1969), less emphasis upon means and ends in maternal instruction (Hess & Shipman, 196S), or less positive and more negative reinforcement (Bee, Van Egeren, Streissguth, Nyman, & Leckie, 1969;Smilansky, 1968).More particularly, the deficit hypothesis has been applied to the symbolic and linguistic environment of the growing child. His linguistic community as portrayed in the early work of Basil Bernstein (1961), for example, is characterized by a restricted code, dealing more in the stereotype of interaction than in language that explains and elaborates upon social and material events. The games that are ' A version of this article will appear in the 1972 National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook on Karly Childhood Education.