Culture and Cognitive Development: From Cross-Cultural Research to Creating Systems of Cultural Mediation
Culture & Psychology, 1 (1):
25--54 (1995)Abstract
The author's intellectual movement over the past two decades, from cross-cultural experimental psychology to the cultural psychology of mediation of human activities and cognitive processes, is described in this paper. Productive use of the concept of culture in psychology entails conceptualization of the future and the past in the present, and taking a process-based look at human activities. Cultural mediation in the case of reading is described. The emphasis on the emergent psychological processes as being culturally constituted leads to the need to explore novel paths in reconstructing psychology's methodology.