Symposium on cross-cultural research in analogical reasoning

Chair: Sean (Yinyuan) Zheng, Northwestern University

Discussant: Dr Caren Walker, University of California, San Diego

Speakers: Dr Stella Christie, Tsinghua University; Dr Lindsey Richland, University of California, Irvine; Dr Daniel Casasanto, Cornell University

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Abstract thinking across cultures: Actions and analogies

Dr Daniel Casasanto, Cornell University

Do some cultures tend to think more abstractly than others? For over a century, Western scholars have maintained that East Asians, and Chinese people in particular, are less capable than their Western counterparts at abstract reasoning. This belief has been motivated in multiple ways, from comparisons of ancient Eastern and Western philosophical traditions to contemporary experimental results. In this talk, however, I will argue that there is no evidence that Chinese people tend to think less abstractly than Westerners, and will provide clear evidence to the contrary. Compared to US Caucasians, Chinese people have been found to attend more strongly to their physical and social context, and attention to context is critical for various kinds of abstract thought. Accordingly, across experiments we find that Chinese people tend to construe actions more abstractly than US Caucasians, and perform dramatically better on a standard test of analogical reasoning.

Culture and Relational Thinking

Dr Stella Christie, Tsinghua University

One prevalent cross-cultural phenomenon is the holistic vs. analytic difference among Easterners and Westerners (e.g., Nisbett, 2001). Decades of cross-cultural research have shown that Easterners are more attentive to contextual relations compared to Westerners—a holistic thinking style that is also often called relational thinking style. But is the relational-holistic cognitive style the same as relational thinking in the sense of analogical reasoning? If so, then we should predict that people with the more holistic thinking style should also be more analogical-relational. Surprisingly, despite the prevalence of both lines of works (relational-holistic and relational-analogical), no studies have directly compared the two. In this talk I will discuss a series of studies that we have done using classic holistic-analytic tasks and a scene analogy mapping task with US and Chinese participants. While we replicated the holistic-analytic (East-West) difference, US and Chinese participants did not differ in the analogy task. I discuss how these results contribute to our understanding of relational thinking across cultures.

Socialization and Maturation: Mechanisms of Analogy Development

Dr Lindsey Richland, University of California, Irvine

How do children become the innovative, generative thinkers they appear by adulthood? Reasoning by analogy has an important function in cognitive development, both enabling complex inferencing from children’s existing knowledge, and bootstrapping new knowledge generation, yet insight into how these skills themselves develop requires cross-cultural data to separate maturation from socialization. I will describe studies from several regions and populations positing that these mechanisms are separable and both are integral to children’s skills, with common developmental pathways related to the constraints of executive functions and age, and disparate pathways related to socialization and the ability to handle relationally complex tasks.

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Contributors

Lindsey Richland is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine and Director of the Science of Learning Lab. Dr Richland's research examines the ways that children develop complex reasoning skills. She examines children's reasoning development in and out of schools, with her classroom research focusing on teaching and learning mathematics. She examines the mechanisms underpinning children's capacity to think flexibly, with studies focusing on the roles of cognitive maturation and individual differences, primary caregiver language and socialization practices, cultural influences, and school routines. She also examines factors shaping children's tendencies to engage in higher order thinking when opportunities are available.

Stella Christie is an Associate Professor at Tsinghua University, Research Chair at the Tsinghua Brain and Intelligence Laboratory, and Director of the Child Cognition Centre. Her research focuses on understanding relational cognition in humans and other animals, investigating questions such as what are the basic relations that humans and/or other animals possess, how we learn to become relational thinkers, and what is the role of relational cognition in the social mind? Having lived in six countries on all hemispheres, Dr Christie has a particular interest in how relational reasoning is influenced by, and influences, language, culture, and social interactions.

Daniel Casasanto is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University and Director of the Experience and Cognition Laboratory. He studies how the diversity of human experience is reflected in our brains and minds: how people with different physical and social experiences come to think, feel, and act differently, in fundamental ways. To study cognitive diversity across cultures, Dr Casasanto’s lab has conducted research across five continents, using methods that range from watching children at play to brain imaging and neuro-stimulation.

Caren Walker is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego and the Director of the Early Learning and Cognition Lab. Dr Walker's research explores how children learn and reason about the causal structure of the world. In particular, she is interested in how even very young learners are able to acquire abstract representations that extend beyond their observations, simply by thinking. How is "learning by thinking" possible? What does this phenomenon tell us about the nature of early mental representations and how they change? To investigate these questions, Dr Walker's work focuses on a suite of activities that impose top-down constraints on human inference (e.g., analogy, explanation, and engagement in imaginary worlds). Her work also explores the development of scientific thinking and reasoning, including children's understanding of uncertainty.