Suzanne Gaskins

Children's Daily Activities in a Mayan Village: A Culturally Grounded Description

Building on recent efforts to reconceptualize development and socialization as contextually grounded processes, several aspects of Yucatec Mayan childrens daily lives are observed, including maintenance activities, social orientation, work, and play. For each category of activity, the behavior of children ranging in age from 0 to 17 is described. Three principles of engagement generated to explain the Mayan cultural context (primacy of adult work, parental beliefs, and independence of child motivation) are used to interpret the descriptive data, illustrating how cultural understanding enables a meaningful interpretation of Mayan childrens behavior and how lack of knowledge of these principles could lead to a misinterpretation through a Western cultural lens.

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.

Cultural and Developmental Influences on Overt Visual Attention to Videos

Top-down influences on observers’ overt attention and how they interact with the features of the visual environment have been extensively investigated, but the cultural and developmental aspects of these modulations have been understudied. In this study we investigated these effects for US and Yucatec Mayan infants, children, and adults. Mayan and US participants viewed videos of two actors performing daily Mayan and US tasks in the foreground and the background while their eyes were tracked. Our region of interest analysis showed that viewers from the US looked significantly less at the foreground activity and spent more time attending to the ‘contextual’ information (static background) compared to Mayans. To investigate how and what visual features of videos were attended to in a comprehensive manner, we used multivariate methods which showed that visual features are attended to differentially by each culture. Additionally, we found that Mayan and US infants utilize the same eye-movement patterns in which fixation duration and saccade amplitude are altered in response to the visual stimuli independently. However, a bifurcation happens by age 6, at which US participants diverge and engage in eye-movement patterns where fixation durations and saccade amplitudes are altered simultaneously.