STUDIES OF MEMORY IN CULTURE
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Abstract
The studies reported here grew out of a sense of frustration for what might be called the “standard” procedure in cross-cultural research. In a series of studies conducted over a three-year period this investigator and colleagues’ compared the word-recall performance of American and Kpelle subjects.? Reliable differences between these two groups were consistently found. Specifically, it was found that Americans when confronted with a task that required the recall of randomly presented words, tended t o cluster those words into taxonomic categories and showed, thereby, improved recall. Kpelle subjects, except those that had at least a sixth-grade education, did not show such clustering effects and consequently showed a marked deficit in recall as compared t o their American counterparts. This appeared t o be a relatively straightforward finding of an overall absence in one culture of the use of the taxonomic properties inherent in words t o aid recall. Several further findings, however, made the results appear less straightforward. First, through a variety of techniques it was established that the Kpelle do indeed categorize common objects ( the stimuli used in the free-recall experiments) and that there was good agreement across informants on the nature and content of these categories. Second, in one study by Cole, et aZ.,l the twenty stimuli used in several of the experiments were held for a few seconds over one of four chairs. Even though the objects were presented randomly, all five objects from any one of the four categories represented in the stimuli list were held over one of the chairs. Thus, each chair cued for one and only one category. This procedure greatly enhanced both taxonomic clustering and recall for Kpelle subjects. On the other hand, several replications of this study done by this investigator (previously unreported) failed t o show such effects. These replications used smaller objects placed in a matrixlike grid and tested the assumption that something like “cueing by spatial location” accounted for the “chairs” results. No such assumption was supported by the results. What we had then was a culture-memory interaction but we knew too little about the culture variable t o account for either the absence or presence of taxonomic clustering in general; nor did we know enough about Kpelle culture to account for why chairs should be an effective cueing device. In fact, chairs are a Western introduction, they are absent in traditional Kpelle culture. It was the aim of the present series of studies then t o describe memory in the context of Kpelle culture. I wanted t o discover, if possible, the extent of taxonomic clustering or any other memory process in the naturally occurring tasks which members of the Kpelle tribe habitually encounter and require the recall of verbal stimuli. I would also argue, incidentally, that the problem we encountered is not unique. All too frequently, cross-cultural studies show differences in performance for some test by people from two or more cultures without being able