PLEASE NOTE: This talk will take place on a different day than usual! Our seminar room has a limited capacity. Please arrive early to ensure you get a seat. The talk will begin promptly at 5. The next talk in the CDC seminar series will be given by: Heidi Keller, University of Osnabrück Date: FRIDAY, April 20, 2012, 5 PM Location: CEU Cognitive Development Center, Hattyú u. 14, 3rd floor *Infancy curricula: Cultural conceptions of natural pedagogy * Abstract: Infancy is the life phase in human ontogeny with the fastest developmental pace. Psychologists and neuroscientists have therefore argued that infancy is especially important for laying the ground for developmental trajectories. From an evolutionary perspective, infancy does not only serve as a preparatory period to acquire competencies that are important for later life, but also to adapt to the environment to ensure survival and thriving. Humans are endowed with behavioral dispositions that are particularly suited to support infant development, i.e. with natural pedagogy. Yet, the environmental challenges and affordances differ substantially, so that there is not one pedagogy, that fits all infants. In this presentation, infancy curricula will be discussed from two very divergent environments: Western middle class families, who cover about 5% of the world’ s population, but determine largely our mainstream understanding of development, and subsistence based farmer families, who cover about 30 to 40 % of the world’ s population but are grossly underrepresented in our textbooks. Families in these two contexts have completely different cultural worldviews and infancy curricula accordingly. It is argued that development can be understood as the cultural solution of universal developmental tasks. Caregivers are endowed with a universal parenting repertoire from which cultural styles have emerged. Cultural variation is not random, but has to be considered systematically if development is to be understood from a global scale. *Cognitive Science events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events* _______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-subscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-unsubscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu