%0 Journal Article
%T Quasi
%A J¨¹rg Wassmann
%A Pierre R. Dasen
%A Ramesh C. Mishra
%J Culture & Psychology
%@ 1461-7056
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1354067X18779043
%X The research presented in this article follows up on several aspects of Gustav Jahoda¡¯s long and fruitful career: (1) his early fieldwork on cognitive development in Africa, particularly in the area of spatial skills; (2) his interest in cross-cultural psychology as a research method; and (3) his insistence on bringing anthropology and psychology together. The topic of our research is the development of a so-called ¡°geocentric¡± frame of spatial reference. This is a cognitive style, in which individuals describe and represent small-scale table-top space in terms of large-scale geographic dimensions. We explore the development with age of geocentric language and cognition, and the relationships between the two. We also explore the many environmental and socio-cultural variables that favor the use of this frame. We demonstrate how we untangled several of these variables by using a succession of within-society group comparisons, in several societies where a geocentric frame is in common usage (Bali, Indonesia, India, and Nepal). Our research program unfolds like a detective story, where one finding that is difficult to interpret because of several confounded variables leads to another quasi-experimental group comparison that suggests another hypothesis, which is then tested in a further session of field-work. In each case, we emphasize how important it was to have extensive linguistic and ethnographic knowledge before implementing psychological tests. The research design is not cross-cultural as such (we hardly ever perform comparisons between societies), but culturally sensitive within a series of societies; in other words, as Dasen and Jahoda (1986, p. 413) defined it, ¡°cross-cultural developmental psychology is not just comparative: essentially it is an outlook that takes culture seriously.
%K Spatial language and cognition
%K child development
%K (cross-)cultural psychology
%K methodology
%K cognitive style
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354067X18779043