Third-Party Attention Across Generations of Guatemalan Mayan Children

• In Event: Collaboration, Harmony, Attention & Acomedido: Learning Strengths among Mexican and Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

Abstract

This study examines changes and continuities over three decades in how 3-6-year-old children in an Indigenous Mayan community use their attention during interactions not directed to them (third-party attention). We compare the attention of children of two generations of the same 22 extended families in a Guatemalan town that has undergone major globalizing shifts (e.g., more schooling, smaller families), like many other Indigenous communities. Grounded in sociocultural theories, particularly the framework of Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI; Rogoff & Mejía-Arauz, 2022), this research explores how children’s attentional practices shift over generations, in a community with reduced opportunities for inclusion in community endeavors.
Analysis of the previous generation (Silva et al., 2015) found that Mayan children were about twice as likely as middle-class European American children to attend to surrounding events. This supported the idea that children in communities that include them broadly in family and community endeavors may be especially attentive to nearby interactions (Morelli et al., 2003).
The study built on Silva et al.’s original analysis, using identical procedures and video ethnography from home visits, to investigate whether children still show keen third-party attention. The setting was a home visit in which the 3–6-year-old target child was present but not instructed to join as their mothers helped toddlers operate nine novel objects.
We used microanalysis of 5-second segments to examine whether the target child paid attention during opportunities for third-party attention to surrounding events (such as when the mother worked with the toddler as the 3-6-year-old was nearby). We coded four categories of attention:
1. Third-party attention to other people working with the novel objects,
2. Third-party attention to other activities (e.g., passerby greeting the family),
3. Focus on own activity, not involved in third-party attention (e.g., playing with a toy),
4. Other alternatives (fussing, showing off, spacing out).

Analyses combined casegraphs, ethnographic interpretation, and statistical comparisons while maintaining fidelity to individual cases (Angelillo et al., 2007).

The current children showed a significant 10% decrease in third-party attention (#1 and #2 combined), compared with their child kin from 30 years before. At the same time, the current children showed a corresponding increase – 10% -- in focusing on their own activities (#3). (There was no difference in their involvement in other activities, #4.)
The findings with the current Mayan children still show much more third-party attention than the European-American children studied by Silva et al. (2015). Thus, although there is now less keen attention to the surroundings by young Mayan children, it is still a strength in their opportunities to learn from what goes on around them.
This work is significant because it documents shifts in children’s attentional engagement within their families accompanying broader societal changes such as an increase in schooling, offering a rare 30-year, longitudinal perspective on sociocultural processes of learning. Results will be shared with participating families and the broader community to collaboratively interpret findings and discuss this valued community way of learning.

Authors

• Itzel Aceves-Azuara, California State University - Sacramento

• Barbara Rogoff, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Katie G. Silva, University of California - Santa Cruz