Studying Executive Function in Culturally Meaningful Ways

ABSTRACT

Children’s development of executive function is a good candidate for studying cultural differences because it is a necessary capacity for becoming competent participants in cultural activities, and yet it is also likely to be shaped by culturally organized everyday experiences, with potential consequences for children’s development and learning. An ethnographically grounded study with Yucatec Maya children was conducted to explore cultural bias in existing theoretical constructs and methods. Yucatec Maya children autonomously organize their daily activities within a dense web of family social connections and work responsibilities. Yet small pilot samples of 4- to 8-year-olds were uninterested in and performed poorly on many traditional measures of EF due to a number of cultural assumptions inherent in the tasks’ logic and demands. Specific cultural road blocks were identified, including assumptions about motivation, task meaning, rules of social interaction, and specific cultural beliefs. Several novel tasks were then developed, comprised of contextually situated, goal-driven tasks, that children were more motivated to engage in. To check on the accuracy of our analysis we propose a design for a future comparative study consisting of a mix of traditional tasks (both culturally interpretable and culturally inappropriate for Yucatec Maya children), and novel, contextually embedded tasks that were engaging for Yucatec Maya children. We close with a cost/benefit analysis of using culturally meaningful research to study children’s development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new systematic data set was created or analysed in this study.

Notes

¹ The first author has done fieldwork in the community reported on here for over four decades. The second author has conducted research in similar communities for nine years.

² All young children in this community attend at least 1 year of preschool and 6 years of primary school. The description of children’s daily lives given above accurately describes the experiences of all the children tested, and there was little variation in parents’ wealth or education.

³ This task is similar to what Diamond suggested in the EF webinar “Creating Connections in Child Development Series” (June 23, 2022), organized by the University of Cambridge.

⁴ In pilot work, Yucatec Maya children were able to work on a series of tasks for two hours or more in a single session, but such a long session would not be feasible for the US children, who needed breaks, snacks, and adult mediation to keep them engaged for even one hour.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation [#202000211].