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Researchers from Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology found that educated children perform better on psychological tests measuring executive function abilities, challenging the accuracy of current measures in studies across different cultures.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June, aimed to evaluate whether the methods used to assess executive function — the ability to execute skills needed for managing daily life, like memory or organization — are potentially biased by cultural factors and experiences.
According to Human Evolutionary Biology professor Joseph Henrich – principal investigator of the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution lab — research on executive function outside of educated populations is limited, causing many scientists to believe the cognitive capabilities may be driven by evolution alone.
But when the researchers performed classic executive functioning exams on schooled and unschooled children, they found that those who did not go to school performed worse — raising questions around whether executive function is biased by cultural factors.
“The biggest concern that cognitive scientists should have from this is that almost everything they understand about cognitive development turns out to be particular to schooled worlds,” Henrich said.
“So this means that everything is kind of a product of this culturally constructed environment,” he added.
The study compared how children aged five to eighteen years old performed across five executive function tasks, which tested behavioral, verbal, and organizational skills. The researchers compared educated participants from the United Kingdom with participants from rural, unindustrialized backgrounds with no exposure to formal schooling from Namibia and Angola.
Using the executive function tests, the researchers found that children in industrialized, highly educated societies were more likely to approach tasks in the way the researchers expected, leading to better performance. For example, when asked to do the opposite of the researchers’ hand gestures, unschooled children were less likely to perform the task despite understanding it.
Across all tasks, educated children from the U.K. demonstrated the highest performance, followed by African participants with some exposure to education, with the lowest performance observed in rural participants in Bolivia and Africa with no exposure to schooling.
But Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Dana C. McCoy, who studies early childhood development and executive function, explained that unschooled populations responding to tasks in unexpected or incorrect ways does not mean they have inferior cognitive development.
“The behaviors that children use to display their executive function are different because there are different environmental demands placed on them,” McCoy said.
“What they need to be doing to manage their behavior, what kinds of impulses they need to avoid, how they need to direct their attention — those are all different depending on the cultural priorities of a given place or the contextual demands of a given place,” she added.
The study’s authors argue the influence of cultural factors indicates that executive function cannot be solely attributed to a universal skill set. Instead, they propose that psychologists redefine the tests used to assess executive functioning, or amend the term’s definition to acknowledge cultural influence.
“I think we need a whole new approach to cognitive science that takes the actual environments in which children grow up in seriously,” Henrich said.
Ivan G. Kroupin, a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and an affiliate with the lab, was the first author on the study. He said he hopes the results will help scientists realize biases in current psychological tests.
“I hope that the paper will push people in the direction of taking the environment seriously,” Kroupin said.
“We can’t presuppose that these capacities, just because we see them all around us, are capacities that are human, universal and applicable to all environments,” he added.
—Staff writer Nari Shin can be reached at nari.shin@thecrimson.com.
