ABSTRACT There is considerable agreement that cognitive development is shaped by culture. Less clear, however, is the mechanism by which culture exerts its influence as cognition unfolds. Prior work has primarily focused on culture as a species-specific medium of cognitive development or as an explicative factor of cognitive capacities. Here we describe a more recent alternative, the culture-as-ecosystem approach. In this view, concepts are embedded within epistemological orientations providing pervasive, widely distributed framework theories that organize people’s knowledge, learning and behaviour. To illustrate the promise of this approach, we review new evidence about how the Wichi, an indigenous population from the Chaco region in North Argentina, reason about hunhat lheley (inhabitants of the earth). By adopting the culture-as-ecosystem approach, we identified a distinct socioecological framework, undocumented elsewhere. This framework, evidenced in young children and adults, is well aligned with Wichi epistemology. We hope that highlighting the theoretical promise and empirical power of the culture-as-ecosystem approach will offer new insights into the intriguing interface between culture and cognition in development.

中文翻译：

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在儿童思维中追踪文化：理解自然的社会生态学框架（Rastreando la cultura en el pensamiento infantil：自然社会生态学）

摘要认知发展是由文化决定的。然而，尚不清楚的是文化如何随着认知的发展而发挥作用。先前的工作主要集中在文化上，将其作为特定种类的认知发展媒介或作为认知能力的解释性因素。在这里，我们描述了一种更新的替代方法，即“文化即生态系统”方法。按照这种观点，概念被嵌入到认识论的取向中，从而提供了广泛的，分布广泛的框架理论，这些理论组织了人们的知识，学习和行为。为了说明这种方法的前景，我们回顾了新的证据，即维奇人（来自北阿根廷查科地区的土著居民）如何引起hunhat lheley（地球上的居民）的原因。通过采用文化作为生态系统的方法，我们确定了一个独特的社会生态框架，在其他地方没有记录。在幼儿和成人中证明的这一框架与Wichi认识论非常吻合。我们希望，强调文化即生态系统方法的理论前景和经验力量，将为文化与发展认知之间有趣的接口提供新的见解。