New Tool Measures Social Skills Across Cultures, Finding Variation Within Communities
Researchers have created TANGO-CC, a web-based test that measures how children understand social cues like gaze—a fundamental cognitive skill. The tool works across languages and communities, revealing that individual differences within societies far outweigh differences between them, offering policymakers and educators new insight into early childhood development worldwide.
Originaltitel: Measuring Variation in Gaze Following Across Communities, Ages, and Individuals: A Showcase of TANGO-CC (Task for Assessing iNdividual differences in Gaze understanding-Open-Cross-Cultural)
<p>Cross-cultural studies are crucial for investigating the cultural variability and universality of cognitive developmental processes. However, cross-cultural assessment tools in cognition across languages and communities are limited. In this article, we describe a gaze-following task designed to measure basic social cognition across individuals, ages, and communities (the Task for Assessing iNdividual differences in Gaze understanding-Open-Cross-Cultural; TANGO-CC). The task was developed and psychometrically assessed in one cultural setting and, with input of local collaborators, adapted for cross-cultural data collection. Minimal language demands and the web-app implementation allow fast and easy contextual adaptations to each community. TANGO-CC captures individual- and community-level variation and shows good internal consistency in a data set of 2.5- to 11-year-old children from 17 diverse communities. Within-communities variation outweighed between-communities variation. We provide an open-source website for researchers to customize and use the task (https://ccp-odc.eva.mpg.de/tango-cc). TANGO-CC can be used to assess basic social cognition in diverse communities and provides a roadmap for researching community-level and individual-level differences across cultures.</p>