{"pk":50302,"title":"Children's division of cognitive labor: Evidence from Kenya and China","subtitle":null,"abstract":"No matter how brilliant, one person cannot achieve major technological innovations alone. Human progress relies upon our ability to think together, building beyond an existing foundation of cumulative cultural knowledge (Heinrich & Muthukrishna, 2024). From five-years-old, children show cooperative capacities fundamental to this collective success (Warneken et al., 2014; Fletcher et al., 2012). Yet, little is known about children's capacity to pool mental resources with cooperative partners – if they can think together as interconnected nodes to surpass individual computational limits (Velez et al., 2022). Prior developmental research also does not fully address cross-cultural diversity in children's cooperative strategy (Rogoff, 2014). Here, we investigate how pairs of children (N = 96 dyads) cooperate on a memory task across two cultural contexts – Nanyuki, Kenya and Beijing, China. We find that children flexibly employ different strategies based on the level of cognitive demand, pointing to an early capacity for strategic cognitive collaboration.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Cognitive development; Distributed cognition; Social cognition; Cross-cultural analysis"}],"section":"Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zz5f6bg","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Colin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jacobs","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Dhara","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Zhen","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Chinese Academy of Sciences","department":""},{"first_name":"Henriette","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zeidler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Sapienza University of Rome","department":""},{"first_name":"Bill","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thompson","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Jan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Engelmann","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50302/galley/38264/download/"}]}