David F. Lancy

The cultural construction of play

Contents: Preface. Part I: Introduction. A. Goncu, S. Gaskins, An Integrative Perspective on Play and Development. Part II: Biological/Ethological Perspectives of Play and Development. P.K. Smith, Evolutionary Foundations and Functions of Play: An Overview. R.W. Mitchell, Pretense in Animals: The Continuing Relevance of Childrens Pretense. A.D. Pellegrini, The Development and Function of Rough-and-Tumble Play in Childhood and Adolescence: A Sexual Selection Theory Perspective. Part III: Social/Cultural Perspectives of Play and Development. M.H. Bornstein, On the Significance of Social Relationships in the Development of Childrens Earliest Symbolic Play: An Ecological Perspective. A. Lillard, Guided Participation: How Mothers Structure and Children Understand Pretend Play. A. Goncu, J. Jain, U. Tuermer, Childrens Play as Cultural Interpretation. S. Gaskins, W. Haight, D.F. Lancy, The Cultural Construction of Play. Part IV: Applied Perspectives of Play and Development. P.L. Harris, Hard Work for the Imagination. M. Taylor, A.M. Mannering, Of Hobbes and Harvey: The Imaginary Companions Created By Children and Adults. A. Nicolopoulou, The Interplay of Play and Narrative in Childrens Development: Theoretical Reflections and Concrete Examples. C.D. Clark, Therapeutic Advantages of Play.

Cooperative and Competitive Behavior Experiments Related to Ethnic Identity and Urbanization in Papua New Guinea

The cooperative-competitive behavior of children in Papua New Guinea was assessed by two experimental techniques that have previously been used within other countries to demonstrate ethnic differences. The results of Experiments 1 and 2, in which the Madsen cooperation board was used, indicate significantly more cooperation between children of an intact tribe than between children in a heterogeneous urban setting. In Experiment 3, the marble-pull apparatus was used to assess the cooperative interaction of children from ten sites which varied in tribal intactness, degree of western contact, and urbanization. The results demonstrate the significance of primary group identification as a determinant of cooperative behavior.

Simulated Travel and Place Location Learning in a Computer Adventure Game.

As numerous surveys attest, place location learning among American school children is inadequate using traditional instructional methods centered on passive map study. This study examined the use of a computerized adventure game to simulate an environmental exploration for fourth and fifth graders. The computer game involved a “treasure hunt”-type search, under subject control, through a simulated environment of thirty “places.” Subjects (N = 120) played individually for forty minutes, while using one of four variations of maps: thirty subjects were given a map with each location named and graphically represented; thirty were given a map with names only; thirty with pictures only and thirty had to play the game without the aid of a map. Subjects were tested for recall of place locations. The main variables examined were type of accompanying map and subject gender. Results showed statistically significant differences among the kinds of maps used. No significant gender differences were found. Subjects in all groups indicated they enjoyed the simulation game experience. Results from a two-week post treatment follow-up test showed high levels of retention for all groups.

When nurture becomes nature: ethnocentrism in studies of human development.

This commentary will extend the territory claimed in the target article by identifying several other areas in the social sciences where findings from the WEIRD population have been over-generalized. An argument is made that the root problem is the ethnocentrism of scholars, textbook authors, and social commentators, which leads them to take their own cultural values as the norm.

Children as a reserve labor force

Human life history is unique in the great length of its juvenile, or immature, period. This lengthened period1 is often attributed to the time required for youth to master the culture, particularly subsistence and survival skills. But studies in increasing number show that children become skilled well before they gain complete independence and adult status. As children learn through play and participation in the domestic economy, they seem to be acquiring a “reserve capacity” of skills and knowledge that may not be fully employed for many years. To resolve this paradox, the theory offered here poses that this reserve capacity of children, both individually and collectively, can be rapidly activated to offset a shortfall in familial resources brought on by crises such as the loss of older family members. Additionally, social forces engendered by war, disease, famine, and economic change may lead to the wholesale recruitment of children into the labor force—with consequent attenuation of the developmental opportunities of an extended juvenility. In effect, humans display a primary life history strategy and an accelerated strategy with a shortened period of dependency. A wide array of cases from anthropology and history will be offered in support of this proposal.

The Indigenous Mathematics Project: An Overview

A multi-disciplinary team research project is described. The project is being undertaken in Papua New Guinea under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and UNESCO. The major goal is to document the relationship between environmental and cultural features, which vary widely in the country, and cognitive development. A second goal is the documentation of mathematics learning and instruction. The paper describes the various components of the project and some of the preliminary findings.

Cognitive Development in Autistic Children

Autism begins at birth or shortly thereafter. Often the first sign parents have that their infant is “different” is that the child is made uncomfortable by human contact and interaction, rather than the reverse, which is normally the case. Where normal infants actively make a visual, auditory, and tactile search of their environment, autistic infants remain relatively passive, staring into space. He or she is an indifferent feeder, and sleeps fitfully. The inactive infant becomes a reluctant toddler; there are delays in various sensorimotor milestones, most notably in speech onset and development. From an early age the autistic child engages in various self-stimulating and stereotypic behaviors, such as flapping his fingers in front of his face, lining up wooden blocks in a row, or just sitting quietly in a corner, rocking back and forth (Morgan, 1981).

Intra-Cultural Variation in Cognitive Development: Conservation of Length Among the Imbonggu

The article reports the results of a study in which twelve different conservation of length tasks, indicative of passage from Piagets preoperational to concrete operational stages of cognitive development, were administered to a sample of individuals from a remote and traditional society in Papua New Guinea. Individuals were systematically selected to represent varying age and education levels. Results are consistent with earlier research which has shown that conservation of length, and, by implication, concrete operations, is fully achieved only after 7 or more years of formal schooling.

STUDIES OF MEMORY IN CULTURE

The studies reported here grew out of a sense of frustration for what might be called the “standard” procedure in cross-cultural research. In a series of studies conducted over a three-year period this investigator and colleagues’ compared the word-recall performance of American and Kpelle subjects.? Reliable differences between these two groups were consistently found. Specifically, it was found that Americans when confronted with a task that required the recall of randomly presented words, tended t o cluster those words into taxonomic categories and showed, thereby, improved recall. Kpelle subjects, except those that had at least a sixth-grade education, did not show such clustering effects and consequently showed a marked deficit in recall as compared t o their American counterparts. This appeared t o be a relatively straightforward finding of an overall absence in one culture of the use of the taxonomic properties inherent in words t o aid recall. Several further findings, however, made the results appear less straightforward. First, through a variety of techniques it was established that the Kpelle do indeed categorize common objects ( the stimuli used in the free-recall experiments) and that there was good agreement across informants on the nature and content of these categories. Second, in one study by Cole, et aZ.,l the twenty stimuli used in several of the experiments were held for a few seconds over one of four chairs. Even though the objects were presented randomly, all five objects from any one of the four categories represented in the stimuli list were held over one of the chairs. Thus, each chair cued for one and only one category. This procedure greatly enhanced both taxonomic clustering and recall for Kpelle subjects. On the other hand, several replications of this study done by this investigator (previously unreported) failed t o show such effects. These replications used smaller objects placed in a matrixlike grid and tested the assumption that something like “cueing by spatial location” accounted for the “chairs” results. No such assumption was supported by the results. What we had then was a culture-memory interaction but we knew too little about the culture variable t o account for either the absence or presence of taxonomic clustering in general; nor did we know enough about Kpelle culture to account for why chairs should be an effective cueing device. In fact, chairs are a Western introduction, they are absent in traditional Kpelle culture. It was the aim of the present series of studies then t o describe memory in the context of Kpelle culture. I wanted t o discover, if possible, the extent of taxonomic clustering or any other memory process in the naturally occurring tasks which members of the Kpelle tribe habitually encounter and require the recall of verbal stimuli. I would also argue, incidentally, that the problem we encountered is not unique. All too frequently, cross-cultural studies show differences in performance for some test by people from two or more cultures without being able

Homo Faber Juvenalis: A Multidisciplinary Survey of Children as Tool Makers/Users

ABSTRACT The overall goal of this paper is to derive a set of generalizations that might characterize children as tool makers/users in the earliest human societies. These generalizations will be sought from the collective wisdom of four distinct bodies of scholarship: lithic archaeology; juvenile chimps as novice tool users; recent laboratory work in human infant and child cognition, focused on objects becoming tools and; the ethnographic study of children learning their community’s tool-kit. The presumption is that this collective wisdom will yield greater insight into children’s development as tool producers and users than has been available to scholars operating within narrower disciplinary limits.