Cross-cultural cognition: developing tests for developing countries

ABSTRACT

The problems of adapting measures of cognitive performance to Third World conditions are described, and three novel adaptations are proposed, one based on speed of sentence comprehension, one on vocabulary acquisition, and a third on speed of visual search using pictorial material. These and other existing tests are applied to studying the cognitive performance of Jamaican children as part of an investigation into the effects on cognition of infection by the parasitic worm Trichuris trichiura. We demonstrate that the tests are usable under Third World field conditions, and give reliable results. The validity of our proposed test is indicated by their capacity to predict scholastic performance. Despite their brevity and avoidance of any demand on literacy, they yielded substantial correlations with the reading, spelling and arithmetic sales of the Wide Range Achievement Test.(AU)