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The Effect of Culture on a Visual-Spatial Memory Task Michael J. Boivin
a
a
Department of Psychology , Spring Arbor College , USA Published online: 06 Jul 2010.
To cite this article: Michael J. Boivin (1991) The Effect of Culture on a VisualSpatial Memory Task, The Journal of General Psychology, 118:4, 327-334, DOI: 10.1080/00221309.1991.9917793 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221309.1991.9917793
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
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The Journal of General Psychology, 118(4). 327-334
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The Effect of Culture on a Visual-S patial Memory Task MICHAEL J. BOIVIN Department of Psychology Spring Arbor College
ABSTRACT. The visual-spatial memory ability of 25 Zairian elementary school children was compared with that of 23 Scottish children, using a variation of Kearins’s (1976) object placement task. The Scottish children demonstrated significantly better visual-spatial memory than the Zairian children when the easiest (small household objects) of three arrays was presented. The Scottish and Zairian children demonstrated a similar level of visual-spatial ability when the other two arrays (geometric shapes and a variety of natural pieces of wood) were presented, and there were no significant gender differences. Although the Australian Aboriginal children’s performance on the visual-spatial task in Drinkwater’s (1976) study was superior to the White children’s performance (Kearins. 1976, 1981), the Zairian children’s performance in this study was not. Perhaps the Aboriginal groups, over countless generations navigating the trackless desert of western Australia, were forced by their environment to develop an aptitude for direction finding that Zairians (whose ecological situation more closely resembles that of Europeans) have not.
IN DISCUSSING THE METHODS used by psychologists to evaluate cognitive distinctions between different racial groups, Kearins (1976) suggested that such measures should be guided by a consideration of the environments in which different racial groups have developed. Thus, Kearins developed visual-spatial memory, visual perception, and identification tasks to evaluate the cognitive skills of Australian Aboriginal children. Kearins’s tasks were a more useful measure than the traditional IQ tests, which emphasize skills that are valued by Western cultures. Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task consisted of either a 20object or 12-object array that was arranged in a matrix. The children were allowed to study the array for 30 s before the objects were gathered in the center of the matrix, at which time children were asked to return each object to its original place in the array. Regardless of whether the objects were natural-small stones, unnatural-household items, different from one another, 327
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or similar to one another, the Aboriginal children’s performance on Kearins’s visual-spatial memory task was significantly better than the performance of their Australian counterparts of European descent. Also, whereas the White Australian children tended to remember more items in the unnatural object arrays than in the natural object arrays the Aboriginal children remembered the items in both types of arrays equally well. Drinkwater (1976) used Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task in an attempt to extend Kearins’s findings to an Aboriginal sample from a nontraditional island community of mixed tribal origin. Unlike the Aboriginal children in Kearins’s (1976) study-who were from traditional desert communities that had little contact with more developed settings-the children in Drinkwater’s Aboriginal sample lived in nontraditional communities that had a moderately high degree of contact with a nearby Queensland coastal city. In contrast to Kearins’s results, Drinkwater’s results did not indicate that the Aboriginal children’s performance on the visual-spatial memory task was significantly better than the White children’s. Furthermore, both the Aboriginal and the White children’s performance was better when familiar, manufactured objects were the subject of the array. Based on the results of her study, Drinkwater concluded that nongenetic ecological factors probably accounted for the superior performance of Kearins’s traditional, desert Aboriginal group. Kearins (1978), however, questioned Drinkwater’s ability to address this issue adequately using Drinkwater’s existing methodology. Kearins suggested that a comparison that included two Aboriginal groups with similar desert histories-one that adhered to traditional cultural practices and one that did not-would help determine whether ecological factors or evolutionary factors were the reason for the Aboriginal children’s superior visual-spatial memory. Thus Kearins (198 I) tested desert Aboriginal children who had been raised in either semitraditional or nontraditional cultural communities; both Aboriginal groups performed better than the White Australian children on visual-spatial memory tasks. Kearins observed what seemed to be a consistent difference between the White children’s and the Aboriginal children’s methods of memorizing the arrays. The Aborigines tended to be still and This work was supported in part by a Growth in Research and Education Award for College Teachers (GREAT)grant awarded by Spring Arbor College, and by a Fulbright Senior Scholar’s Research Award administered through the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars and the U.S.Information Agency. Jean Abell and Mukwabatu Muwandi provided invaluable assistance by serving as translators for the Zairian children. Malcolm Jeeves of St. Andrews University was gracious enough to make his laboratoryfacilities availablefor the testing of the Scottish children. Requestsfor reprints should be sent to Michael J. Boivin, Department of Psychology, Spring Arbor College, Spring Arbor, MI 49283.
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silent while they studied the arrays, whereas the White children were generally fidgety and restless, often muttering to themselves as they handled or pointed to objects. According to Kearins, the White children’s verbal behavior may have been an attempt to employ verbal coding strategies. In this study, I used a modified version of Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task. There were three different object arrays, whose contents differed in terms of their familiarity and in terms of how easily they could be named. The performance of children of European descent and background (Scottish) was compared with the performance of children of another ethnic group from a semitraditionalculture in a developing African country (Zaire).
Method Subjects The Zairian children attended the Baptist mission school of Moanza, which was situated on the Inzia River, about 300 km east of Kinshasa in the Bandundu Province. Eight boys and 4 girls, all either 7 or 8 years old, were selected from the second-grade class, and 7 boys and 6 girls who ranged from 11 to 13 years old were selected from the fifth-grade class. Most of the children, who lived in small traditional villages within about 3 km of Moanza, were Basuku, the predominant tribe in the region. All the children were righthanded, except one. Eleven boys and 12 girls from 7 to 8 years old were recruited in the town of St. Andrews, Scotland by means of local advertisements posted at university-ownedhousing. The children were typically from Scottish families on vacation for a 1- or 2-week period. Each child was paid €1 sterling for participating in the study. The Zairian children were tested at an educational missionary’s home in Moanza. The Scottish children were tested in a psychological laboratory at the University of St. Andrews. Materials The task was a modified version of Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task. Whereas Kearins used a 20-item (5 x 4) and a 12-item (4 x 3) array of objects designed for adolescents, I used a 9-item (3 x 3) array deemed to be of a reasonable degree of difficulty for children 7 or 8 years old. The boundaries for the array, which were drawn on white poster board (76 cm x 46 cm), consisted of a box (46 cm x 45 cm) divided into nine squares (16 cm x 16 cm) with black borders .70 cm thick. Three different arrays of objects, always in the same order, were presented to each child. The first set of objects-including a plastic cup, metal spoon, pencil, pen, playing card, large coin, hair pick, and small knife-
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were common household items that both the Scottish and the Zairian children were expected to be familiar with and have names for in their respective languages. This array was comparable to Kearins's unnaturavdifferent array; all the objects were manmade and differed from one another in more than one way. Both the Zairian and the Scottish children had no difficulty naming all of the objects correctly. The second set of objects consisted of wooden blocks of various geometric shapes taken from the Tactual Performance Task Form Board of the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (Jarvis & Barth, 1984). The wooden blocks, which were all about 10 cm in diameter and of similar color and texture, differed only with respect to their shape-a cross, triangle, half circle, circle, ellipse, star, square, slanted parallelogram, and rectangle. The geometric blocks would be classified by Kearins as unnatural/ same because they were manmade, and although they differed in shape, they belonged to the same category. Typically, a Zairian child in this study could correctly name the shape of about half of the blocks, whereas a Scottish child could name six or seven. Kearins's natural object arrays included rocks and shells, which, although familiar to Aboriginal children, are very uncommon in the Bandundu terrain where the Zairian children were tested. However, Zairians use many types of wood in a variety of household and recreational tasks; hence the third set of objects consisted of small pieces of wood of various types, colors, shapes, and textures. The wood-bamboo, palm, mango, frangi pani, papaya-was selected from six different species of trees common to the gallery forests and savanna scrub of the Bandundu region. The same items were used with the Scottish children. The Zairian children could typically name several of the trees from which the wood had been taken, but most of the Scottish children and the Zairian children had difficulty naming the pieces of wood. Kearins would have classified this object array as naturalhame; the pieces of wood were not manmade, and although they differed in shape, color, regularity, and size, they belonged to the same category. The same three object arrays were used for both the Zairian and the Scottish children, and the objects in the arrays were always initially arranged in the same manner. The three arrays differed in that the objects they contained could be more easily or less easily named by the children. Procedure
Both the Zairian and the Scottish children were tested individually, after being ushered into a room and seated at a small table. On the table was the first object array, covered by a white sheet. The Zairian children were given instructions in Kituba through an interpreter; the Scottish children were given instructions in English by the examiner.
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The children were told that beneath the sheet were nine objects, each in its own square or box, and that the children would be given half a minute to study the arrangement, at which time the objects would be gathered in the middle and the child would be asked to return each object to its original square. Each child was asked to repeat in his or her own words what he or she was being asked to do. If it was evident from the child’s description that he or she understood the task, the first array was uncovered, and the child was given 30 s to study it. The array was then covered with the sheet, the items were gathered in the middle of the matrix, scrambled, and uncovered again for the child to arrange. The child was allowed as much time as he or she wished to place the objects in their original squares. Then the examiner recorded the position of each item, noting the number of items that had been misplaced. The child was asked to turn around and face away from the board while the examiner removed the first array and positioned and covered the items in the second array. The child was asked to face the board again, and the second array was uncovered. The same procedure was followed for the third array.
Although the Zairian children were considerably older (M = 10.06 years, SD = 2.58) than the Scottish children (M = 7.45 years, SD = 0.96), their performance on the object placement task for the household items was significantly poorer, t(46) = -4.06, p < .001 than the Scottish children’s. On average, the Zairian children placed six or seven of the nine items correctly (M = 6.60, SD = 1.76), whereas most of the Scottish children had perfect scores (M = 8.35, SD = 1.19). Although both groups of children had more difficulty with the wooden geometric blocks, the Scottish children’s performance was better (M = 5.09, SD = 2.07) than the Zairian children’s (M = 4.60, SD = 2.22). However, the difference in performance was not significant, t(46) = - .79, p = .44. On the task with the array of wood pieces, the Scottish children’s performance (M = 6.44, SD = 1.62) was better than the Zairian children’s (M = 5.96, SD = 2.49). Again, the difference in performance was not significant, t(46) = - . 8 0 , p = .44. Because of the significant age difference between the two groups of children, I repeated the previous comparison for each of the arrays, using a twofactor analysis of covariance model, with culture and gender as the factors and age as the covariate. Culture was a significant factor only for the household objects F( 1,44) = 20.07, p .001. Gender was not a significant factor for any of the arrays, and there were no significant interaction effects.
-=
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There was a high Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient between performance on the geometric block array and the wood pieces array, r(47) = .49, p < .001. This finding and the lower correlations between the household object array and geometric block array, r(47) = .32; and wood piece array, r(47) = .38, indicate that the memory task for the household objects was less difficult and somewhat distinct from the memory task for the geometric blocks and wood pieces.
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Discussion In contrast to Kearins’s (1976, 1981) finding that Aboriginal children had significantly better visual-spatial memory ability than White children for all the types of object arrays tested, I found that the Scottish children-even though they were younger than the Zairian children-performed better. The only significant difference between the Scottish and the Zairian children’s performance, however, was for the array of unnatural objects that were different (household objects), which contained the objects that were most easily named by the children, most familiar, and most easily distinguishable. The Zairian and the Scottish children’s memory performances were most similar for the object arrays that were less distinguishableand less easily named. This finding was consistent with Drinkwater’s (1976) results in her comparison of nontribal, medium-contact Aboriginal children’s performance with White suburban children’s performance. Kearins (1981) observed that the Aboriginal children-whether they came from desert, semitraditional, or nontraditional groups-tended to study the array in stillness and silence. The White Australian children, on the other hand, were more restless and replaced the objects in their original squares at a pace that was initially much more hurried and uneven than the Aboriginal children’s. According to Kearins, these behavioral differences might have indicated a fundamental difference in memory strategy for the two groups. The Aboriginal children tended toward a more adaptive means of cognitive mapping, perhaps because their tribal groups, over tens of thousands of years, had to locate shifting sources of water in trackless desert. This adaptive visualspatial memory ability was still apparent in present-day Aboriginal groups, even though they no longer cope day-to-day in the same ecological setting as their ancestors did. Thus, Kearins favored an evolutionary explanation for the visual-spatial memory ability demonstrated by the Aboriginal children. In my study, the manner in which the Zairian and the Scottish children studied the array and pursued the object placement task did not differ noticeably. Both groups of children looked at the objects in the array, occasionally picking up or touching an item. They sometimes moved in their chairs and sometimes not.
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Perhaps this apparent difference between the Zairian children’s performance and Aboriginal children’s performance is not surprising. The ecological conditions in which the traditional tribal groups of West Africa lived are markedly different from the Aboriginal children’s ancestors’ ecological conditions. Compared with the western Australian desert, Zaire’s Bandundu rivers, gallery forests, and adjacent savanna grassland hills are topographically distinctive and navigable. Hence, Zairian children learn to navigate in a lipear manner with the aid of trails, rivers, roads, and forest landmarks; Zairian children rarely need to practice orienteering across open country to approach a specific location from a new direction as an Aboriginal child would when searching across open terrain for a recent and isolated water source. Similar to the Zairian children, children of European descent have found their way amidst forests, mountains, hills, rivers, and villages for tens of thousands of years. It seems there is little differencebetween the Zairian children’s and the Scottish children’s ecological adaptation. As I noted previously, unlike Kearins, Drinkwater (1976) did not observe significant differences between the performance of Aboriginal children living in nontraditionalgroups and the performance of their White Australian counterparts. In discussing Drinkwater’s findings, Kearins (1978) suggested that perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of these results was Drinkwater’s discovery of a cognitive performance task that did not significantly favor White children who had been raised in a better educational and economic situation. That is, the fact that the Aboriginal and White Australian children showed a similar level of ability on a cognitive performance task was newsworthy in itself in light of consistent assessment findings that favored White children (e.g., the “culture-fair” Queensland test of Australia, McElwain, & Kearney, [1970]). The same might be said of the results of this study. With the less distinguishable and thus, more difficult, object arrays, there were no significant differences between the Scottish children’s and the Zairian children’s performance. This finding is in contrast to other assessment instruments employed with samples of Zairian children in the Bandundu province (Boivin & Bornefeld, 1990). On the Matrix Analogies Test (Naglieri, 1985), the Tactual Performance Task of the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (Jarvis & Barth, 1984), and the Simultaneous and Sequential Reasoning subsections of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (Kaufman & Kaufman, 1983), the Zairian children scored significantly below the agerelated norms that had been established for these instruments with large samples of American children. Although these instruments are generally considered to be nonverbal, culture-fair measures of various facets of cognitive ability, they all originated within the context of Western psychological research and theory, and any direct relevance to the local adaptive quirements of native peoples in a developing culture is coincidental.
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Kearins and others, however, have encouraged the use of cognitive performance tasks designed to tap the ecologically based cognitive abilities of target populations. It is likely that these tasks will be more useful than traditional measures for evaluating the basic cognitive abilities of different racial and cultural groups. Kearins’s (1976) object placement task could also be used to elucidate the blend of social, ecological and evolutionary factors that contribute to a distinctive cognitive ability. Such a measure could be applied to another traditional cultural group adapting within an environment that does not require that particular cognitive skill. The application of a variation of Kearins’s object placement task to Zairian children provides a better understanding of the ecological and evolutionary factors that favor the development of the Aboriginal children’s enhanced visual-spatial memory skills. REFERENCES Boivin, M. J., & Bornefeld, B. C. (1990, March). An intercultural assessment of the nonverbal cognitive performance of children in Zaire, Africa. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Albion, MI. Drinkwater, B. A. (1976). Visual memory skills of medium contact aboriginal children. Australian Journal of Psychology, 28, 37-43. Jarvis, P. J., & Barth, J. T. (1984). Halstead-Reitan test battery: An interpretive guide. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources. Kaufman, A. S., & Kaufman, N. L. (1983). Kaufman Assessment Batteryfor Children: Interpretive manual. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Services Inc. Kearins, J. (1976). Skill of desert Aboriginal children. In G. E. Kearney & D. W. McElwain (Eds.), Aboriginal cognition: Retrospect and prospect (pp. 199-212). Canberra, Australia: Australia Institute of Aboriginal Studies Center. Kearins, J. (1978). Visual memory skills of Western Desert and Queensland children of Australian Aboriginal descent: A reply to Drinkwater. Australian Journal of Psychology, 30, 1-5. Kearins, J. (1981). Visual spatial memory in Australian Aboriginal children of desert regions. Cognitive Psychology, 13, 434-460. McElwain, D. W., & Kearney, G. E. (1970). Queensland Test handbook. Melbourne, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research. Naglieri, J. A. (1985). Matrix Analogies Test-Expanded Form. Columbus, OH: Merrill.
Received January 8, I991
The Journal of General Psychology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vgen20
The Effect of Culture on a Visual-Spatial Memory Task Michael J. Boivin
a
a
Department of Psychology , Spring Arbor College , USA Published online: 06 Jul 2010.
To cite this article: Michael J. Boivin (1991) The Effect of Culture on a VisualSpatial Memory Task, The Journal of General Psychology, 118:4, 327-334, DOI: 10.1080/00221309.1991.9917793 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221309.1991.9917793
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:54 26 April 2015
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
The Journal of General Psychology, 118(4). 327-334
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The Effect of Culture on a Visual-S patial Memory Task MICHAEL J. BOIVIN Department of Psychology Spring Arbor College
ABSTRACT. The visual-spatial memory ability of 25 Zairian elementary school children was compared with that of 23 Scottish children, using a variation of Kearins’s (1976) object placement task. The Scottish children demonstrated significantly better visual-spatial memory than the Zairian children when the easiest (small household objects) of three arrays was presented. The Scottish and Zairian children demonstrated a similar level of visual-spatial ability when the other two arrays (geometric shapes and a variety of natural pieces of wood) were presented, and there were no significant gender differences. Although the Australian Aboriginal children’s performance on the visual-spatial task in Drinkwater’s (1976) study was superior to the White children’s performance (Kearins. 1976, 1981), the Zairian children’s performance in this study was not. Perhaps the Aboriginal groups, over countless generations navigating the trackless desert of western Australia, were forced by their environment to develop an aptitude for direction finding that Zairians (whose ecological situation more closely resembles that of Europeans) have not.
IN DISCUSSING THE METHODS used by psychologists to evaluate cognitive distinctions between different racial groups, Kearins (1976) suggested that such measures should be guided by a consideration of the environments in which different racial groups have developed. Thus, Kearins developed visual-spatial memory, visual perception, and identification tasks to evaluate the cognitive skills of Australian Aboriginal children. Kearins’s tasks were a more useful measure than the traditional IQ tests, which emphasize skills that are valued by Western cultures. Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task consisted of either a 20object or 12-object array that was arranged in a matrix. The children were allowed to study the array for 30 s before the objects were gathered in the center of the matrix, at which time children were asked to return each object to its original place in the array. Regardless of whether the objects were natural-small stones, unnatural-household items, different from one another, 327
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or similar to one another, the Aboriginal children’s performance on Kearins’s visual-spatial memory task was significantly better than the performance of their Australian counterparts of European descent. Also, whereas the White Australian children tended to remember more items in the unnatural object arrays than in the natural object arrays the Aboriginal children remembered the items in both types of arrays equally well. Drinkwater (1976) used Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task in an attempt to extend Kearins’s findings to an Aboriginal sample from a nontraditional island community of mixed tribal origin. Unlike the Aboriginal children in Kearins’s (1976) study-who were from traditional desert communities that had little contact with more developed settings-the children in Drinkwater’s Aboriginal sample lived in nontraditional communities that had a moderately high degree of contact with a nearby Queensland coastal city. In contrast to Kearins’s results, Drinkwater’s results did not indicate that the Aboriginal children’s performance on the visual-spatial memory task was significantly better than the White children’s. Furthermore, both the Aboriginal and the White children’s performance was better when familiar, manufactured objects were the subject of the array. Based on the results of her study, Drinkwater concluded that nongenetic ecological factors probably accounted for the superior performance of Kearins’s traditional, desert Aboriginal group. Kearins (1978), however, questioned Drinkwater’s ability to address this issue adequately using Drinkwater’s existing methodology. Kearins suggested that a comparison that included two Aboriginal groups with similar desert histories-one that adhered to traditional cultural practices and one that did not-would help determine whether ecological factors or evolutionary factors were the reason for the Aboriginal children’s superior visual-spatial memory. Thus Kearins (198 I) tested desert Aboriginal children who had been raised in either semitraditional or nontraditional cultural communities; both Aboriginal groups performed better than the White Australian children on visual-spatial memory tasks. Kearins observed what seemed to be a consistent difference between the White children’s and the Aboriginal children’s methods of memorizing the arrays. The Aborigines tended to be still and This work was supported in part by a Growth in Research and Education Award for College Teachers (GREAT)grant awarded by Spring Arbor College, and by a Fulbright Senior Scholar’s Research Award administered through the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars and the U.S.Information Agency. Jean Abell and Mukwabatu Muwandi provided invaluable assistance by serving as translators for the Zairian children. Malcolm Jeeves of St. Andrews University was gracious enough to make his laboratoryfacilities availablefor the testing of the Scottish children. Requestsfor reprints should be sent to Michael J. Boivin, Department of Psychology, Spring Arbor College, Spring Arbor, MI 49283.
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silent while they studied the arrays, whereas the White children were generally fidgety and restless, often muttering to themselves as they handled or pointed to objects. According to Kearins, the White children’s verbal behavior may have been an attempt to employ verbal coding strategies. In this study, I used a modified version of Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task. There were three different object arrays, whose contents differed in terms of their familiarity and in terms of how easily they could be named. The performance of children of European descent and background (Scottish) was compared with the performance of children of another ethnic group from a semitraditionalculture in a developing African country (Zaire).
Method Subjects The Zairian children attended the Baptist mission school of Moanza, which was situated on the Inzia River, about 300 km east of Kinshasa in the Bandundu Province. Eight boys and 4 girls, all either 7 or 8 years old, were selected from the second-grade class, and 7 boys and 6 girls who ranged from 11 to 13 years old were selected from the fifth-grade class. Most of the children, who lived in small traditional villages within about 3 km of Moanza, were Basuku, the predominant tribe in the region. All the children were righthanded, except one. Eleven boys and 12 girls from 7 to 8 years old were recruited in the town of St. Andrews, Scotland by means of local advertisements posted at university-ownedhousing. The children were typically from Scottish families on vacation for a 1- or 2-week period. Each child was paid €1 sterling for participating in the study. The Zairian children were tested at an educational missionary’s home in Moanza. The Scottish children were tested in a psychological laboratory at the University of St. Andrews. Materials The task was a modified version of Kearins’s (1976) visual-spatial memory task. Whereas Kearins used a 20-item (5 x 4) and a 12-item (4 x 3) array of objects designed for adolescents, I used a 9-item (3 x 3) array deemed to be of a reasonable degree of difficulty for children 7 or 8 years old. The boundaries for the array, which were drawn on white poster board (76 cm x 46 cm), consisted of a box (46 cm x 45 cm) divided into nine squares (16 cm x 16 cm) with black borders .70 cm thick. Three different arrays of objects, always in the same order, were presented to each child. The first set of objects-including a plastic cup, metal spoon, pencil, pen, playing card, large coin, hair pick, and small knife-
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were common household items that both the Scottish and the Zairian children were expected to be familiar with and have names for in their respective languages. This array was comparable to Kearins's unnaturavdifferent array; all the objects were manmade and differed from one another in more than one way. Both the Zairian and the Scottish children had no difficulty naming all of the objects correctly. The second set of objects consisted of wooden blocks of various geometric shapes taken from the Tactual Performance Task Form Board of the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (Jarvis & Barth, 1984). The wooden blocks, which were all about 10 cm in diameter and of similar color and texture, differed only with respect to their shape-a cross, triangle, half circle, circle, ellipse, star, square, slanted parallelogram, and rectangle. The geometric blocks would be classified by Kearins as unnatural/ same because they were manmade, and although they differed in shape, they belonged to the same category. Typically, a Zairian child in this study could correctly name the shape of about half of the blocks, whereas a Scottish child could name six or seven. Kearins's natural object arrays included rocks and shells, which, although familiar to Aboriginal children, are very uncommon in the Bandundu terrain where the Zairian children were tested. However, Zairians use many types of wood in a variety of household and recreational tasks; hence the third set of objects consisted of small pieces of wood of various types, colors, shapes, and textures. The wood-bamboo, palm, mango, frangi pani, papaya-was selected from six different species of trees common to the gallery forests and savanna scrub of the Bandundu region. The same items were used with the Scottish children. The Zairian children could typically name several of the trees from which the wood had been taken, but most of the Scottish children and the Zairian children had difficulty naming the pieces of wood. Kearins would have classified this object array as naturalhame; the pieces of wood were not manmade, and although they differed in shape, color, regularity, and size, they belonged to the same category. The same three object arrays were used for both the Zairian and the Scottish children, and the objects in the arrays were always initially arranged in the same manner. The three arrays differed in that the objects they contained could be more easily or less easily named by the children. Procedure
Both the Zairian and the Scottish children were tested individually, after being ushered into a room and seated at a small table. On the table was the first object array, covered by a white sheet. The Zairian children were given instructions in Kituba through an interpreter; the Scottish children were given instructions in English by the examiner.
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The children were told that beneath the sheet were nine objects, each in its own square or box, and that the children would be given half a minute to study the arrangement, at which time the objects would be gathered in the middle and the child would be asked to return each object to its original square. Each child was asked to repeat in his or her own words what he or she was being asked to do. If it was evident from the child’s description that he or she understood the task, the first array was uncovered, and the child was given 30 s to study it. The array was then covered with the sheet, the items were gathered in the middle of the matrix, scrambled, and uncovered again for the child to arrange. The child was allowed as much time as he or she wished to place the objects in their original squares. Then the examiner recorded the position of each item, noting the number of items that had been misplaced. The child was asked to turn around and face away from the board while the examiner removed the first array and positioned and covered the items in the second array. The child was asked to face the board again, and the second array was uncovered. The same procedure was followed for the third array.
Although the Zairian children were considerably older (M = 10.06 years, SD = 2.58) than the Scottish children (M = 7.45 years, SD = 0.96), their performance on the object placement task for the household items was significantly poorer, t(46) = -4.06, p < .001 than the Scottish children’s. On average, the Zairian children placed six or seven of the nine items correctly (M = 6.60, SD = 1.76), whereas most of the Scottish children had perfect scores (M = 8.35, SD = 1.19). Although both groups of children had more difficulty with the wooden geometric blocks, the Scottish children’s performance was better (M = 5.09, SD = 2.07) than the Zairian children’s (M = 4.60, SD = 2.22). However, the difference in performance was not significant, t(46) = - .79, p = .44. On the task with the array of wood pieces, the Scottish children’s performance (M = 6.44, SD = 1.62) was better than the Zairian children’s (M = 5.96, SD = 2.49). Again, the difference in performance was not significant, t(46) = - . 8 0 , p = .44. Because of the significant age difference between the two groups of children, I repeated the previous comparison for each of the arrays, using a twofactor analysis of covariance model, with culture and gender as the factors and age as the covariate. Culture was a significant factor only for the household objects F( 1,44) = 20.07, p .001. Gender was not a significant factor for any of the arrays, and there were no significant interaction effects.
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There was a high Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient between performance on the geometric block array and the wood pieces array, r(47) = .49, p < .001. This finding and the lower correlations between the household object array and geometric block array, r(47) = .32; and wood piece array, r(47) = .38, indicate that the memory task for the household objects was less difficult and somewhat distinct from the memory task for the geometric blocks and wood pieces.
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Discussion In contrast to Kearins’s (1976, 1981) finding that Aboriginal children had significantly better visual-spatial memory ability than White children for all the types of object arrays tested, I found that the Scottish children-even though they were younger than the Zairian children-performed better. The only significant difference between the Scottish and the Zairian children’s performance, however, was for the array of unnatural objects that were different (household objects), which contained the objects that were most easily named by the children, most familiar, and most easily distinguishable. The Zairian and the Scottish children’s memory performances were most similar for the object arrays that were less distinguishableand less easily named. This finding was consistent with Drinkwater’s (1976) results in her comparison of nontribal, medium-contact Aboriginal children’s performance with White suburban children’s performance. Kearins (1981) observed that the Aboriginal children-whether they came from desert, semitraditional, or nontraditional groups-tended to study the array in stillness and silence. The White Australian children, on the other hand, were more restless and replaced the objects in their original squares at a pace that was initially much more hurried and uneven than the Aboriginal children’s. According to Kearins, these behavioral differences might have indicated a fundamental difference in memory strategy for the two groups. The Aboriginal children tended toward a more adaptive means of cognitive mapping, perhaps because their tribal groups, over tens of thousands of years, had to locate shifting sources of water in trackless desert. This adaptive visualspatial memory ability was still apparent in present-day Aboriginal groups, even though they no longer cope day-to-day in the same ecological setting as their ancestors did. Thus, Kearins favored an evolutionary explanation for the visual-spatial memory ability demonstrated by the Aboriginal children. In my study, the manner in which the Zairian and the Scottish children studied the array and pursued the object placement task did not differ noticeably. Both groups of children looked at the objects in the array, occasionally picking up or touching an item. They sometimes moved in their chairs and sometimes not.
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Perhaps this apparent difference between the Zairian children’s performance and Aboriginal children’s performance is not surprising. The ecological conditions in which the traditional tribal groups of West Africa lived are markedly different from the Aboriginal children’s ancestors’ ecological conditions. Compared with the western Australian desert, Zaire’s Bandundu rivers, gallery forests, and adjacent savanna grassland hills are topographically distinctive and navigable. Hence, Zairian children learn to navigate in a lipear manner with the aid of trails, rivers, roads, and forest landmarks; Zairian children rarely need to practice orienteering across open country to approach a specific location from a new direction as an Aboriginal child would when searching across open terrain for a recent and isolated water source. Similar to the Zairian children, children of European descent have found their way amidst forests, mountains, hills, rivers, and villages for tens of thousands of years. It seems there is little differencebetween the Zairian children’s and the Scottish children’s ecological adaptation. As I noted previously, unlike Kearins, Drinkwater (1976) did not observe significant differences between the performance of Aboriginal children living in nontraditionalgroups and the performance of their White Australian counterparts. In discussing Drinkwater’s findings, Kearins (1978) suggested that perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of these results was Drinkwater’s discovery of a cognitive performance task that did not significantly favor White children who had been raised in a better educational and economic situation. That is, the fact that the Aboriginal and White Australian children showed a similar level of ability on a cognitive performance task was newsworthy in itself in light of consistent assessment findings that favored White children (e.g., the “culture-fair” Queensland test of Australia, McElwain, & Kearney, [1970]). The same might be said of the results of this study. With the less distinguishable and thus, more difficult, object arrays, there were no significant differences between the Scottish children’s and the Zairian children’s performance. This finding is in contrast to other assessment instruments employed with samples of Zairian children in the Bandundu province (Boivin & Bornefeld, 1990). On the Matrix Analogies Test (Naglieri, 1985), the Tactual Performance Task of the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (Jarvis & Barth, 1984), and the Simultaneous and Sequential Reasoning subsections of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (Kaufman & Kaufman, 1983), the Zairian children scored significantly below the agerelated norms that had been established for these instruments with large samples of American children. Although these instruments are generally considered to be nonverbal, culture-fair measures of various facets of cognitive ability, they all originated within the context of Western psychological research and theory, and any direct relevance to the local adaptive quirements of native peoples in a developing culture is coincidental.
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Kearins and others, however, have encouraged the use of cognitive performance tasks designed to tap the ecologically based cognitive abilities of target populations. It is likely that these tasks will be more useful than traditional measures for evaluating the basic cognitive abilities of different racial and cultural groups. Kearins’s (1976) object placement task could also be used to elucidate the blend of social, ecological and evolutionary factors that contribute to a distinctive cognitive ability. Such a measure could be applied to another traditional cultural group adapting within an environment that does not require that particular cognitive skill. The application of a variation of Kearins’s object placement task to Zairian children provides a better understanding of the ecological and evolutionary factors that favor the development of the Aboriginal children’s enhanced visual-spatial memory skills. REFERENCES Boivin, M. J., & Bornefeld, B. C. (1990, March). An intercultural assessment of the nonverbal cognitive performance of children in Zaire, Africa. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Albion, MI. Drinkwater, B. A. (1976). Visual memory skills of medium contact aboriginal children. Australian Journal of Psychology, 28, 37-43. Jarvis, P. J., & Barth, J. T. (1984). Halstead-Reitan test battery: An interpretive guide. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources. Kaufman, A. S., & Kaufman, N. L. (1983). Kaufman Assessment Batteryfor Children: Interpretive manual. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Services Inc. Kearins, J. (1976). Skill of desert Aboriginal children. In G. E. Kearney & D. W. McElwain (Eds.), Aboriginal cognition: Retrospect and prospect (pp. 199-212). Canberra, Australia: Australia Institute of Aboriginal Studies Center. Kearins, J. (1978). Visual memory skills of Western Desert and Queensland children of Australian Aboriginal descent: A reply to Drinkwater. Australian Journal of Psychology, 30, 1-5. Kearins, J. (1981). Visual spatial memory in Australian Aboriginal children of desert regions. Cognitive Psychology, 13, 434-460. McElwain, D. W., & Kearney, G. E. (1970). Queensland Test handbook. Melbourne, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research. Naglieri, J. A. (1985). Matrix Analogies Test-Expanded Form. Columbus, OH: Merrill.
Received January 8, I991
