Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research with infants from mostly western, developed countries has suggested that infants from a very young age have a sophisticated understanding of the world around them. However, it remains unclear whether the methodological approaches used to explore these topics, and their corresponding findings, extend across cultures or whether they vary with the specific cultural context. In the current study, across three experiments, we explore whether Tsimane' infants and children, a farmer-foraging group living in the Bolivian Amazon, have similar visual preferences as well as expectations regarding an agent's goal-directed actions compared to infants from the United States. Our results are the first to suggest that Tsimane' infants and children performed similarly to infants from the United States, holding similar expectations for agents to engage in goal-directed actions as well as similar preferences for faces and complex patterns.