Rodrigo A. Taipe IB Psychology Miss.

Zafonte December 22, 2011 Culture And The Cognitive Perspective (Re-do) Explain how cultural considerations may affect interpretation of behavior from the cognitive perspective The cognitive perspective is concerned with the understanding of the mental processes such as perception, thinking, memory, problem solving, and how they may be related to behavior. Culture makes people think different. People from different parts of the world can see things that other people see daily as abnormal, for example, in the Amazon Rainforest spider monkeys are given the status of pets. While in America, people can only see them in the Zoo, and they will never see them as pets. In some cases, people in the Amazon may also see them as a source of food. Furthermore, people give importance to things according to what their own culture tells them. This is the reason why people from two different countries interpret things in different ways. This statement is supported by Omari & MacGinities study on depth perception in children (1972) and Bartletts memory study (1932). Both of these studies illustrate how cultural considerations may affect interpretation of behavior from the cognitive perspective. In the study of perception, Dr. Omari and MacGinities experiment, gathered a sample of subjects from three schools in Tanzania, East Africa. They were 20 children balanced for sex, from grades: 1, 3, 5, 7. None of the subjects spoke English. MacGinitie and Omari also chose their subjects from different geographical areas and economic status. One group was from the city, another group was from a small town, and the third one was from a remote area. The purpose of their choices was to prove the hypothesis that states that children from rural areas would give more 2D responses. The researchers presented them with a series of pictures. The first group had the pictures of Hudson and a second series of pictures (pictures revised by Omari and MacGinitie). In the first group appeared a man with a spear, an elephant, and an antelope. In the second group, a goat and a cow replaced the elephant and the antelope. The purpose of the experiment was to observe their abilities to sense depth. The results showed how children were influenced by their culture. Animals that were familiar to the children gave a more positive response. Also, the higher the grade, the better they performed in the experiment. Kids that spend more time in school could have more contact with pictures. This is why they were able to perform better. On the other hand, in Hudson experiment, the children did not see the pictures as simple pictorial representations, instead as a real life situation. This can be due to their lack of educational background and lack of contact with pictures. The children did not see the pictures as mere representations. They give them a higher real-life value. The children said, the man had to kill the elephant first, otherwise it would kill him. This is similar to the first study made by Omari and Cook. Some children said, The antelope was nearer the man because the elephant was on a hill, and climbing there would be more tiring and consequently take more time. This shows that the children gave the characters motivational relations according to their positions in the pictures. Their cultural background influenced in the response (in their culture, there is not pictorial representations).

Meanwhile, in Bartletts study (1932), he proved that people with different cultural backgrounds have extremely different perspective on how the world works. The schema helps understand how this difference occurs. A schema is an organizational framework that stores, categorizes, and interprets incoming information based on an individuals previous experiences. This framework not only used in storing and organizing information, but also has a great changing effect on how memories are remembered and recited. In his study on schemas and memory, he asked his subjects (Eastern Europeans) to recall parts of stories. One story told about Native Americans was hard to recall by his subjects. There were confusions, such as how the word canoe was changed to boat in almost every subjects retelling of the story. This is the effect of one schema, or lack of one, because the Europeans had never encountered these specific cultural worlds previous to the experiment. The subjects often excluded very essential elements of the story, from a Native Americans perception, such as many main characters being ghosts, the supernatural death of the young man, and the name settings. The earlier memories of the subjects disregarded these phenomena as illogical because they did not fit into the predetermined schema. Dr. Bartlett determined that the schemas of the subjects altered their perceptions of the story and affected how the information was stored. The subjects dismissed the supernatural parts of the story because they did not believe in the paranormal. For the Europeans subjects, their world does not have beings such as spirits, so that piece of the story was removed from their memory by their schemata. Therefore, they altered the story so it could be easier to remember for them. The subjects forced the story into a schema, as a framework of how the world works. Their culture specific schemas actively discarded information that was not important in the European cultural perspective, radically changing and redesigning their memory. In conclusion, culture can affect the way people can understand, classify, solve problems, and remember information.