Cognitive development
Cross-cultural variation, especially in behavior, is a significant factor that should be clearly understood when studying cultural behaviors; this is because the cognitive development in a cultural setting will be contributed more by their kin, community members, and peers. Those types of people will allow them to learn through the different social-psychological processes present in the community, such as instructions, modeling, shared activities, or guidance. This kind of opportunity is implicitly and explicitly arranged to fit the individual and developmental needs of a child; they occur in an informal and formal setting (Kärtner et al., 2020). When a particular child can participate in a cultural activity, at that time, he is being introduced to the conventional way of acting and thinking of that specific cultural community.
However, children develop cognitive prowess through the transactions they have with tools, symbols, and cultural members. E.g., children from North America and Western Europe tend to describe themselves by their unique characteristics like I am good at drawing. While children from Asia, Africa, South America, and Southern Europe tend to describe themselves around their social roles and their relationship with others, i.e., I Josephine is my best friend.
In another example, when preschoolers were asked to describe a special and personal experience they recently had. The American and European children provided a more detailed description, recall more specific events, and stressed their opinions, feelings, and preferences. On the other hand, Asian children were more focused on the people they met, and they related. When we understand all these cultural factors, we can clearly have an easy time studying how a child might develop cognitive wise.
When we take a look at environmental variation, we can see how it may affect a child cognitive development; this can be seen in a situation where if a child is brought up in an environment where there are few opportunities and inadequate stimulation in terms of the learning process a child might end up having a poor cognitive development outcome. When a child comes from an environmental background where his parents’ socio-economic status is low, he may end up getting low educational attainment and poor nutrition when he is still an infant (Vallie & Sechrist, 2018). As
This may not be the same case to a child coming from a well-off background where a wide range of opportunities is available for him or her to exploit, starting from nutrition to educational opportunities accessible to him. The understanding of cross-cultural and environmental variation will help a researcher know how to respond or even interact when charged with a situation that involves analyzing why a particular child is behaving the way is behaving. These two factors would have helped cut their work short since they would know the source of the problem.
References
Kärtner, J., Schuhmacher, N., & Torréns, M. G. (2020). Culture and early social-cognitive development. New Perspectives on Early Social-Cognitive Development, 254, 225.
Vallie, M., & Sechrist, G. (2018). Skyscrapers or Silos? How Environment Impacts Child Cognitive Development.