Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Outward differences between cultures are very salient, with Western and East Asian cultures as a prominent comparison pair. A large literature describes cross-cultural variation in cognition, but relatively less research has explored the developmental origins of this variation. This study helps to fill the empirical gap by replicating four prominent findings documenting cross-cultural differences in children's reasoning, visual attention, and social cognition in a cross-sectional sample of 240 3-12-year-olds from the US and China. We observe cross-cultural differences in three of the four tasks and describe the distinct developmental trajectory that each task follows throughout early and middle childhood.