Cross-cultural similarities and differences in North Americans’ geographic location judgments

We examined some potential causes of bias in geographic location estimates by comparing location estimates of North American cities made by Canadian, U.S., and Mexican university students. All three groups placed most Mexican cities near the equator, which implies that all e influenced by shared beliefs about the locationthree groups wers of geographical regions relative to global reference points. However, the groups divided North America into different regions and differed in the relative accuracy of the estimates within them, which implies that there was an influence of culture-specific knowledge. The data support a category-based system of plausible reasoning, in which biases in judgments are multiply determined, and underscore the utility of the estimation paradigm as a tool in cross-cultural cognitive research.     

The classification of children's knowledge: development on the balance-scale and inclined-plane tasks

R.S. Siegler (1981, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 46 C2, Serial No. 189) has shown that performance on several Piagetian tasks is governed by similar rule structures. The purpose of the first study was to extend his analysis to the inclined-plane task, replicate his original observations about development on the balance-scale task, and determine the consistency in children's rule usage across tasks. We found that Siegler's (1981) binary decision representations adequately characterized development on these tasks, and there was fair correspondence of rule classifications across tasks. An alternative classification procedure, used to diagnose the rules of children who failed our original classification criteria, showed that most of these children's performance patterns were very similar to Siegler's rule patterns. In the second experiment, we improved the diagnosticity of our rule-assessment protocol in light of F. Wilkening and N. H. Anderson's (1982, Psychological Bulletin, 92, 215-237) criticisms, and observed that many Rule III children's predictions were associated with those of integration rules on both tasks. Despite these methodological improvements, many children, especially 5- to 7-year-olds, evidenced use of centration and lexicographic strategies, suggesting that these classifications are not simply an artifact of problem sampling. Some of the problems associated with the classification of children's knowledge are discussed.     

The development of geographic categories and biases

Children and university students (N=58) estimated the locations of major cities in North America. At age 9, a distinct home region was apparent, but no differentiation between northern US and Canadian cities. At 11, four developments were observed: Children divided North America into regions that were not based solely on national boundaries but were the same as university students' regions; psychological border zones between regions exaggerated distances between them; children used new location information to update their estimates for all cities in a seeded region and in adjacent and nonadjacent regions; children preserved the ordinal structure of their initial location estimates for cities in their home region but relied on regional prototype locations to adjust estimates in less familiar regions. The updating methods reflect fundamentally different mechanisms. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.     

A “misrepresentation” of method as theory : Reply

Previous studies on the development of problem-solving skills in compensation tasks suggest that sequential decision theory more accurately describes the earlier phases of development than information integration theory. Compared to information integration theory, sequential decision theory appears to provide a more valid representation of children's and adults' processing of simpler compensation problems. On more developmentally advanced compensation problems, adults appear to use a variety of strategies. Information integration is capable of describing many of these patterns accurately. However, detailed analyses of performances by children and adults indicate that processing compensation problems by algebraic integration is the exception, rather than the general rule.     

Gender differences in visual attention to television form and content

Formal features (i.e., rapid action, dialogue, and animation) and content variables (i.e., violence, theme, and sex of characters) were analyzed as possible determinants of gender differences in children's television viewing. Two studies are reported. In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old boys' and girls' visual attention was observed during four animated programs representing four combinations of high and low action with high and low violence. Boys' visual attention was greater than girls'. Attention was higher to high violence than to low violence. Boys' attention did not vary across treatments, but girls attended more to programs with low action than with high action. In Study 2, nine earlier laboratory studies, each with an independent sample, were subjected to a secondary analysis. The procedures were similar to Study 1; the samples ranged from 3 to 11 years old. Across experiments, boys attended significantly more than girls. The secondary analysis was designed to identify program form and content variables that might account for gender differences. Most content and form attributes failed to account for the pattern of gender differences in attention across or within studies. There was weak support for the notion that violent content and animation appeals more to boys than girls. Boys' greater visual attention was not associated with greater comprehension relative to girls'. It was proposed that girls focus more on the verbal auditory content of television, and boys focus more on the visual content.     

Spatial location judgments: a cross-national comparison of estimation bias in subjective North American geography

We examined alternate explanations for distortions in the subjective representation of North American geography. One explanation, based on physical proximity, predicts that bias in location estimates should increase with the distance from a participant's home city or region. An alternative is that biases arise from combining accurate and inaccurate beliefs about the cities and the superordinate regions to which they belong, including beliefs that may have social or cultural origins. To distinguish these, Canadians from Alberta and Americans from Texas judged the latitudes of cities in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The Texans' estimates of Mexican locations were 16" (approximately 1,120 miles) more biased than their estimates of Canadian locations that were actually about 840 miles farther away. This finding eliminates proximity as a primary source of geographic biases and underscores the role of categorical beliefs as an important source of biased judgments.