ABSTRACT
The research literature in cross-cultural cognitive psychology is dominated by studies where some form of instrument or test is administered to samples of rural nonwestern peoples and their performance is compared to samples of urban, westernized people. The results of these studies (see for example, ( Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971); Dasen, 1977; (Greenfield, 1966); Stevenson, Parker, Wilkinson, Bonneveaux, & Gonzalez, 1978) have been fairly consistent. The pattern of performance and/or success rate of the nonwestern groups is suboptimal as compared to the more westernized groups. This pattern of results can be interpreted within a deficit or difference framework (( Cole & Bruner, 1971)). In the deficit interpretation poorer performance is due to the individual's lack of experience with intellectually taxing situations, leading to the failure to develop the requisite information-processing capability. For example, Seagrim and Lendon (1980) showed a direct relationship between the amount of information in the Australian aboriginal child's environment and his or her level of information-processing efficiency. When aboriginal children were raised in an environment where there were lots of things to learn about and remember, performance on various measures of information processing was indistinguishable for comparable white middle-class children. For those children raised in an impoverished rural environment ( not in the bush ) with few things to learn about, there was no evidence that they had developed recognizable and efficient informationprocessing procedures.
