Poster #7 - The (non-)universality of development measured by typical executive function tasks: Effects of culture and schooling

• In Event: Poster Session 12

Abstract

Executive functions (EF) have generally assumed to be universal (e.g. Diamond, 2013), yet work with populations in developing countries has identified striking developmental differences (e.g. Legare et al., 2012). Recent research has emphasized the role of environmental deficits in these differences and/or have made efforts to modify typical developmental EF tasks to better tap existing capacities in these groups (e.g. Obradovic & Willoughby, 2019; Obradovic et al., 2022; Alcala, 2022).
This work tests a complementary hypothesis: Typical developmental EF tasks, ubiquitous in theory and assessment, may to some extent measure culturally-specific skill sets, and not the development of universal self-regulation capacities.
We administered a battery of common developmental EF tasks (Dimensional Change Card Sort [DCCS], forward/backward span, Luria's hand game, verbal fluency) across one Western and three indigenous populations (ages 5-17, total N=283) varying in cultural background and presence/quality of schooling: 1) British (high-quality schooling) 2) Tsimane (overwhelmingly innumerate/illiterate despite attending school) 3) Himba/Twa (no schooling) 4) Himba/Zemba (high-quality schooling). The latter two groups provide a natural experiment where cultural background and resources are equivalent across groups but access to formal schooling varies.
Results indicate typical EF measures often track the development of cognitive skills which are partially or wholly culture-specific. To illustrate: UK and schooled-Himba children show typical developmental trajectories on DCCS, with an early and sharp transition from consistent failure to near-ceiling performance in the course of a year (before 5y for UK, 6-7y for schooled-Himba). Tsimane (minimal schooling) and unschooled Himba differ dramatically: Performance gradually improves across ages 6-17, Tsimane children reaching ceiling only in the oldest age groups and Himba children never doing so. More than half of 13-14y/o unschooled children fail DCCS and only 75% of 15-17y/os succeed. This pattern is not the result of a failure to understand the task - at least 90% of participants in all samples succeeded on the pre-switch trials, indicating their ability to correctly interpret stimuli and instructions. Moreover, analyses exclude participants who fail pre-switch. Results from the remaining measures show similar patterns of significant, often qualitative, differences in performance across schooling status and/or exposure to Western-urban culture.
One may interpret these results as evidence that teenagers in the Global South with limited/no access to schooling have the same level of universally-developing self-regulation as their 7y/o schooled or 4y/o Western peers. A more sensible alternative is available if we reconceptualize EF development as necessarily involving the development of domain-specific skills (Doebel, 2020). In this case, our results suggest that what we have considered and measured as universal EF capacities in fact partly reflect a skill set peculiarly developed in Western, urban and/or schooled environments.
Positing cultural-specificity in EF skills is not an alternative to explaining differences in terms of environmental deficits. Neither does it deny the reality of some universal self-regulation mechanisms. Rather, this work motivates investigation into the relationship between universal and non-universal aspects of EF and how these articulate with particular cultural environments.

Authors

• Ivan Kroupin, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Helen Elizabeth Davis, Harvard University

• Joseph Henrich, Harvard University