Mind–culture interactions: How writing molds ... - ResearchGate

12 S. Kazi et al. / Intelligence xxx (2012) xxx–xxxFig. 4. Performance (z-scores) on cognitive domains across age and nationality. Note. Error bars indicate ±2 SΕ.5. DiscussionThe present findings were highly informative for both thedevelopment and the organization of cognitive processes at avery early age and the long debate about cultural influences ontheir development and organization. It is reminded that, inagreement with our first prediction about performance differences,we found that Chinese outperformed Greeks from as earlyas the age of four years in fundamental processes that maybe associated with writing. However, we also found thatChinese outperformed Greeks in more general thought andself-awareness processes from this early age, although it mighthave been predicted that possible differences in these processeswould need time to appear. In agreement with our secondprediction, the overall organization of cognitive processes wasthe same in the two ethnic groups. However, in agreement withour third prediction about possible differences in the strength ofrelations between processes, we did find that reading-relatedprocessing efficiency was more closely related with workingmemory and that working memory was more closely related toinference in the Chinese. Bearing in mind the possible limitationsin the representativeness of our samples and also the possibleFig. 5. Performance on hypercognitive evaluation tasks across age and nationality. Note. Error bars indicate ±2 SE.Please cite this article as: Kazi, S., et al., Mind–culture interactions: How writing molds mental fluidity in early development,Intelligence (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2012.07.001