Educating attention - The emergence of cultural differences in attentional styles

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Joscha Kärtner
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 381466066

The proposed project aims at, first, documenting the emergence of cross-cultural differences in 4- to 9-year-olds' attentional style and, second, at providing empirical evidence for the assumption that caregivers' attention guidance is one of the forces driving differential development. The basic claim is that culture and language give rise to the habitualized ways of perceiving the world. While previous cross-cultural studies have documented the emergence of holistic attention (i.e., context-sensitive processing) as being typical for East-Asian and Indigenous-heritage participants and analytic attention (i.e., object-focused processing) as characteristic of Western urban middle-class participants from around 4 to 7 years of age, not much work has focused on the proximal mechanisms underlying differential development. Overall, the proposed study follows a convergent evidence approach and, in order to substantiate anticipated findings on socio-cultural influences (Study 1), applies two further approaches, namely a priming (Study 2) and a training approach (Study 3). In all three studies, children's attentional style will be assessed by three tasks: first, a picture description task, in which children's relative emphasis on the focal object and its features will be coded, second, a forced-choice recognition task, in which relative memory performance for details of the focal objects over the background will be coded, and, third, an eye-tracking task, in which the relative duration of gaze on the focal object will be coded. Study 1 focuses on documenting the emergence of cross-cultural differences in analytic and holistic attention between 4 and 9 years of age in three cultural contexts, namely urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany, and Kyoto, Japan, and rural Nso families from Kumbo, Cameroon. Furthermore, Study 1 assesses how caregivers guide children's attention and how this relates to children's spontaneous attentional style. In the priming study (Study 2), language primes will be used to manipulate children's visual attention under experimentally controlled conditions. In the training study (Study 3), the main aim is to see whether language-based attention guidance in a 10-day media-based training has the power to produce lasting effects on children's attentional style. In both studies (Study 2 and 3), 4- to 9-year-olds will be randomly assigned to either a condition in which pictures are presented together with a prerecorded verbal description focusing on the object and its features (analytic condition) or on background elements and their relations (holistic condition). After that, the effect on the object scores of three tasks (i.e., picture description task, forced-choice recognition task, eye-tracking task) will be examined. In concert, the three methodological approaches allow to test the causal relation that is hypothesized to exist between language as a tool to educate children's attention and children's attentional style.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants