VI. CROSS-CULTURAL INVESTIGATIONS Yukari Okamoto, Robbie Case, Charles Bleiker, atid Barbara Henderson No evidence has yet been presented on the development of children's central conceptual structures in any culture other than that of North America. In the present chapter, we present data that were gathered in two other cultures. First, however, we provide a brief review of the prohlem that cross-cultural work has posed for research in the classic Piagetian tradi- tion and of our own position on this problem. CROSS-CULTURAL VARIABILITY IN CHILDREN'S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT Of the various difficulties that beset Piaget's theory in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the most interesting was the difficulty posed by cross-cultural investigations. The basic data are easily summarized, (a) Children in other cultures do not always pass Piaget's tests at the same age as European or North American children. In certain traditional cultures, for example, cer- tain conservation tests are not passed until the age of puberty, and others are not passed at ail {Bruner, Oliver, & Greenfield, 1966; Dasen, 1972). (b) Virtually none oi Piaget's formal tasks are passed in traditional oral cultures at any age or stage of development (Dasen, 1972). Even in modern postin- dustrial societies, certain subcultures can be found in vvhich adults' passing rates on these tasks are extremely low. (c) In countries where the opportu- nity for schooling is limited, children who have not heen to school normally perform much worse on Piaget's tasks than those who have, whether these tasks are concrete or formal (Cole, Gay, Click, 8c Sharp, 1971; Fiati, 1992). {d) Finally, some of the most sophisticated intellectual activities in which notiliterate, nonschooled, and/or non-Western adults engage are difficult to classify within the context of Piaget's theory—they do not seem to be 131