No abstract

Previous studies suggest that people from the Western hemisphere tend to explain others’ behavior based on a person’s traits and dispositions, while participants from non-Western cultural settings more likely refer to situational factors. From a developmental perspective, it has been suggested that culture-specific modes of explaining behavior gradually emerge during late childhood and adolescence. The present study explored whether traces of a corresponding culture-specific development can be found at earlier ages when using simplified assessments. In total, 438 children between 4 and 9 years old from Münster (urban Germany), Kyoto (urban Japan), and Cotacachi (rural Ecuador), were asked to explain positive and deviant behaviors of children depicted in simple picture-based vignettes. While more internal attributions were given in Münster than in Kyoto and Cotacachi children at 4 to 5 years old, these cultural differences disappeared as internal attributions significantly increased with age in Kyoto and Cotacachi but not Münster children. Analyzing children’s explanations on a level of subcategories revealed more subtle cultural specificities. For example, when giving internal explanations, Cotacachi children focused on stable traits, while Münster children emphasized individual desires and Kyoto children highlighted more volatile aspects. Cross-cultural differences in children’s social explanations could partially be explained by mothers’ preference for autonomy-related socialization goals. Taken together, this study provides evidence for an earlier onset of internal explanations when they are culturally accentuated and further calls for a more nuanced approach to capture culture-specific meaning systems reflected in everyday social explanations.

Across cultures, there are marked differences in visual attention that gradually develop between 4 and 6 years of age. According to the social orientation hypothesis, people in interdependent cultures should show more pronounced context sensitivity than people in independent cultures. However, according to the differential familiarity hypothesis, the focus on the salient object should also depend on the familiarity of the stimulus; people will focus more on the focal object (i.e., less context sensitivity), if it is a less familiar stimulus. To examine the differences in visual attention between interdependent and independent cultures while taking into account stimulus familiarity, this study used an eye-tracking paradigm to assess visual attention of participants between 4 and 20 years who came from urban middle-class families from Germany (n = 53; independent culture) or from Nso families in a rural area in Cameroon (n = 50; interdependent culture). Each participant saw four sets of stimuli, which varied in terms of their familiarity: (1) standard stimuli, (2) non-semantic stimuli, both more familiar to participants from Germany, (3) culture-specific matched stimuli, and (4) simple stimuli, similarly familiar to the individuals of both cultures. Overall, the findings show that mean differences in visual attention between cultures were highly contingent on the stimuli sets: In support of the social orientation hypothesis, German participants showed a higher object focus for the culture-specific matched stimuli, while there were no cultural differences for the simple set. In support of the differential familiarity hypothesis, the Cameroonian participants showed a higher object focus for the less familiar sets, namely the standard and non-semantic sets. Furthermore, context sensitivity correlated across all the sets. In sum, these findings suggest that the familiarity of a stimulus strongly affects individuals' visual attention, meaning that stimulus familiarity needs to be considered when investigating culture-specific differences in attentional styles.

Preschoolers can reason by exclusion in collaborative decision-making.-Children's reasoning by exclusion gets better when the task has an objectively correct solution than when the task does not have a correct solution.

Previous cross‐cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context‐sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the field is that attention styles are gradually socialized in culture‐specific interactions in childhood, empirical evidence for the proximal mechanisms underlying this development is scarce. This study aimed to document the emergence of cross‐cultural differences in attention styles in three cultural contexts differing in social orientations, namely in urban middle‐class families from Münster, Germany (i.e., more independent context), and Kyoto, Japan, and Indigenous‐heritage families from Cotacachi, Ecuador (i.e., more interdependent contexts). Furthermore, to test the assumption that caregivers’ attention guidance is one of the forces driving differential development, we investigated how caregivers guide children's attention. In total, 270 children between 4 and 9 years of age and their mothers participated in three tasks: an eye‐tracking task, a picture description task and a forced‐choice recognition task. Results indicate a mixed pattern of findings: While some tasks revealed the expected cultural differences, namely a higher object focus in Münster compared to Kyoto and Cotacachi, others did not. Regarding caregivers’ attention guidance, we found that mothers in Münster more strongly emphasized the focal object than mothers in Kyoto and Cotacachi. The results are discussed in terms of culture‐specific developmental trajectories and the generalizability of attentional processes across tasks and cultural contexts.Research Highlights We investigated visual attention styles in 4‐ to 9‐year‐old children and their mothers from urban Germany, urban Japan, and rural Ecuador in three different tasks. Special emphasis lied on mothers’ verbal attention guidance toward their children as a proximal mechanism underlying the emergence of culture‐specific attention styles. Mothers from urban Germany guided their children's attention in more analytic ways than mothers from urban Japan and rural Ecuador. The relevance of verbal attention guidance in the development of culture‐specific attention styles has been demonstrated beyond the East‐West dichotomy.