US–China Differences in Children's Reasoning, Visual Attention, and Social Cognition

Abstract

Outward differences between cultures are very salient, with Western and East Asian cultures as a prominent comparison pair. A large literature describes cross‐cultural variation in cognition, but relatively less research has explored the developmental origins of this variation and those findings that are reported have not typically been replicated. This study helps to fill this empirical gap by replicating four prominent findings documenting cross‐cultural differences in children's relational reasoning, picture description, causal attribution, and uniqueness preference in a cross‐sectional sample of 240 3–12‐year‐olds from the United States and China. We observed cross‐cultural differences in picture description, causal attribution, and uniqueness preference, though the uniqueness preference result was in the opposite direction of the predicted direction. Performance in each task followed a different developmental trajectory, but we did not observe interactions between age and cultural differences. We also did not observe strong associations in performance across tasks, or between task performance and a range of demographic factors. Overall, these results suggest that existing developmental measures may be insufficiently precise to support strong mechanistic inferences about cognitive differences across cultures.