CBB Seminar | Social Seminar ~ Ivan Kroupin, Harvard University

Social Seminar 

Ivan Kroupin ~ Post Doc, Human Evolutionary Biology and Psychology, Harvard University

Title: Back to school: How cross-cultural research can inform a cognitive-computational theory of schooling

Formal schooling is a recent cultural institution that intensively and intentionally re-shapes children's cognition from an early age. At the same time, over 99% of research samples come from schooled groups, and most experimental paradigms resemble, or are directly derived from, school tests.
Yet, we have no cognitive/computational account of formal schooling. Nor do we generally separate the effects of becoming proficient in school-like reasoning from universal forms of cognitive development — or adult cognitive performance.

In this talk, I will show how an analysis of the historical, sociological, and cross-cultural psychological evidence allows us to 'distill' a core feature of the schooling environment — one which is definable in both cultural-historical and computational terms. Namely, schools are structured around 'solvable situations': Problems in which an exhaustive set of exceptionless rules defines a state of maximal reward.

Reviewing decades of evidence — including ongoing work at the Namibian/Angolan fieldsite I co-direct — I show how differences between schooled and unschooled populations on standard cognitive tasks can largely be attributed to the former having developed relevant priors and expertise in identifying and navigating solvable situations. By extension, this suggests that performance on many standard cognitive measures requires expertise with solvable situations — a form of development not yet systematically studied, but now definable computationally, and empirically tractable.

I close with a discussion of future directions for this research program and how the study of formal schooling can serve as an example of the broader project of reconciling cultural and cognitive-computational branches of psychology.

****ALL the CBB and Social talks this semester will meet on Thursdays, 12:00-1:15pm in CGIS South S010 Tsai Auditorium.***