Abstract
How do children learn in everyday situations? This article reviews recent findings of cultural variation in effective support for infants’ learning and navigating challenging situations to illustrate a culture-first approach to studying early learning. It contrasts the paradigm that treats culture as a variable added to a generic process for differentiating outcomes across groups. Culture-first research begins with analyzing cultural frameworks of how learning is defined, practiced, and fostered by the focal community, which informs the selection of behaviors to measure. The culture-first approach shifts the perspective from deficit-oriented to strengths-based to identify different profiles of parental guidance that effectively support early learning and various strengths that children begin to develop during infancy. The article underscores the need to bridge domains and cross disciplinary lines toward an understanding of learning that is culturally construed from the outset to inform strategies to support all learners.
The question of how children learn has long captured the interest of psychological scientists. Addressing this question has the potential to inform practices and policies to foster learning for children from diverse backgrounds. Research focusing on young children has converged to support the idea that learning is coconstructed by children and caregivers in everyday endeavors (e.g., Keller, 2007; Rogoff, 2014; Tamis-LeMonda & Masek, 2023). Thus, the process of learning is deeply cultural. However, research that centers cultural contexts and lived experiences in studying learning is still the minority of psychological science. A systematic investigation with a cultural lens enables researchers to obtain data that reflect a multitude of everyday experiences for a deeper understanding of the psychological processes that individuals engage in. On the other hand, underutilizing cultural approaches reflects a missed opportunity for the field to address the question of how humans develop and learn in equity-minded ways.
This article describes the culture-first approach to examining how young children navigate learning and develop strengths for learning with caregivers. At its core is analyzing cultural beliefs and practices before selecting behaviors to measure (Fig. 1). It contrasts the outcome-first paradigm, conventionally adopted in the field, that treats culture as a variable added to a generic process for differentiating outcomes across groups to identify a better way of learning. The outcome-first paradigm derives from and reinforces deficit views of learning that emphasize what is lacking in the underperforming group, steering practices and policies to promote one way of learning while dismissing other ways. The culture-first approach shifts the perspective from deficit-oriented to strengths-based to identify various strengths that young children bring to learning and the strategies that can be used to support all learners (Miller et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2021).
Flowchart depicting the culture-first approach to studying early learning.
To illustrate the culture-first approach, the sections below provide a focused review of research on how infants learn about objects and navigate challenging situations with caregivers. The research demonstrates how cultural analysis can expand and transform learning theories. The article closes with a brief discussion of how to bridge domains and cross disciplinary lines toward an understanding of learning that is culturally construed from the outset.
Cultural Ways of Learning in Infancy
A key topic of early learning concerns intuitive physics. From a young age, infants demonstrate sensitivity to physical rules, which are causal relations between an object feature and the outcome of a physical event, leading them to various expectations (Y. Lin et al., 2022). For example, when infants notice a causal relation between the feature height and the outcome of a covering event—that the relative heights of a rigid cover and an object determine whether the cover can fully hide the object—infants now expect, when a short cover is lowered over a tall object, that the object should remain partly hidden under the cover. Research that examined infants’ learning about physical rules has relied on observation-only experiments in the laboratory. Typically, infants are presented with events in which objects are moved around to form different spatial relations; the presentation does not allow infants to act on the objects. After the presentation, learning outcomes are assessed. With this paradigm, research has converged to show that infants can learn a new physical rule by watching neatly organized examples that demonstrate the rule (Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017; Wang & Baillargeon, 2008; Wang & Kohne, 2007). But how do infants learn about physical rules in messier, everyday situations?
Because learning in everyday life is culturally situated, a prerequisite to addressing the question is to understand how learning is defined, practiced, and fostered by the focal community. Taking the culture-first approach, my colleagues and I have conducted research with Chinese-heritage communities, starting with the question of how learning is construed by the communities. Reviewing literatures in psychology, the philosophy of education, ethnology, and history brought us to the perspective that, for Chinese-heritage communities who endorse Confucian principles, learning is construed as seeking and incorporating guidance from more knowledgeable members to accomplish the task at hand (e.g., Flanagan, 2011). Confucian notions of learning involve “the emulation of others who have charted the way, who have become exemplars of human goodness and who have consistently embodied it in their lives” (Flanagan, 2011, p. 137). Modeling proper actions by caregivers is highly valued, and the need for children to practice proper actions is emphasized (e.g., Hsiung, 2005). In other words, Confucian-based principles encourage Chinese-heritage caregivers to provide a clear guidance and children to act in concert with the guidance, which differs from many European-heritage communities that encourage children to take the lead in learning (e.g., Jose et al., 2000).
From Ideologies to Measures: Two Empirical Examples
Taking this perspective, Zhang et al. (2021) integrated three cultural ideals central to the communities—xiào (filial piety), guaˇn (to govern), and dào dé gua-n (virtues)—and connected them with Chinese ways of learning. The framework led researchers to choose behaviors related to a cultural practice unique to Chinese-heritage families to observe, that is, parental behaviors of directive guidance. In addition, the framework called for the need to situate the observation in the context of activities that prompted infants to navigate challenges with caregivers. Directive guidance is defined as didactic, reciprocal, and relational practices that embody behavioral and emotional hallmarks of parents providing explicit guidance and instructions for children in the face of challenges. On the basis of the cultural framework, one would expect culturally distinct patterns at both the individual and the dyadic level. At the individual level, Chinese-heritage parents were expected to provide direct information (instead of asking explorative questions) laid out in smaller steps (instead of leaving things open-ended) and closely manage children’s attention. If children digressed, parents would intervene and redirect children back to the task. In response, children would readily follow the guidance and stay engaged in the task. At the dyadic level, Chinese-heritage parents and children were expected to collaborate on the task (instead of taking turns to work on the task independently). As a result of fostered collaboration, children were expected to exceed the current skill level without intense conflict or frustration because the dyad tackled the task jointly.
Two studies examined the above predictions in which Chinese-heritage mothers and their 9-month-old babies in Taipei, Taiwan, engaged in a challenging task: to operate a sort-and-spin toy that required dexterity and muscle strength beyond the infants’ age (Zhang et al., 2021) or to learn a new physical rule with objects that were too large for the infants to handle (Wang, 2025). Across the studies, mother-infant interactions were coded on hand-holding, parental intervention, parental demonstration, and infant exploration (Table 1) to examine the predictions derived from the analysis of cultural beliefs and practices. Note that the behavioral measures were selected after the cultural analysis. Contrasting the outcome-first paradigm, the culture-first approach begins with clarifying what drives a behavior before measuring it to address the question of why in the first place. This order enables researchers to interpret participants’ experience on their own terms and connect it with everyday lived context (Miller & Cho, 2018).
Measures of Parental Guidance and Infant Exploration in Wang (2025) and Zhang et al. (2021)
Note: This table includes a subset of measures from Wang (2025) to compare the results across two studies. For example, the total number of episodes of free exploration by infants was also measured in Wang (2025) but not included here.
The results converged to show that the Taipei dyads coenacted directive guidance more frequently than the Santa Cruz dyads (Table 2). For example, mothers in Taipei frequently held infants’ hands or arms to help them accomplish a goal beyond their current skills and intervened off-task actions (e.g., mouthing the toy) without much hesitation to bring infants back on track. These forms of directive guidance led to more opportunities for infants in Taipei to contribute to operating the toy than their European-heritage counterparts in Santa Cruz (Zhang et al., 2021). Interestingly, parental demonstration and infant exploration, two measures that steered the dyads away from directive guidance, varied depending on the context of activity. When attempting to operate the sort-and-spin toy, the Santa Cruz mothers gave more demonstrations; because the Taipei infants engaged in more collaborative operations of the toy, they engaged in independent exploration less (Zhang et al., 2021). When attempting to teach infants the physical rule, mothers at the two sites demonstrated the rule with similar frequency; in this context, the Taipei infants amassed more free exploration than their Santa Cruz peers (Wang, 2025). Additional research on parental question asking with preschool-aged children also showed context specificity in the cultural pattern (Wang & Basch, 2024), highlighting the need to discern the nature of the learning context and distinguish different contexts.
Parental Guidance and Infant Exploration in Wang (2025, Study 1) and Zhang et al. (2021)
Note: When infants engaged in off-task actions, parental intervention was measured for frequency in Wang (2025), in which the Taipei mothers intervened more often, and for latency in Zhang et al. (2021), in which the Santa Cruz mothers waited longer before intervening. The opposite pattern of infant exploration reflected the nature of the learning context. In Zhang et al. (2021), toy operation involved two steps; the Taipei infants engaged in collaborative completion more often than the Santa Cruz infants, leaving less time for their free exploration.
p < .05. **p < .001.
Context Specificity and Cultural Complexity
Critically, one behavioral hallmark of directive guidance—hand-holding—was consistent across contexts and study settings. Whether they were observed with a sturdy toy at home or with handmade stimuli and minimized distraction in the lab, Chinese-heritage infants in Taipei allowed caregivers to hold their hands or arms in performing actions that exceeded their current skills. The frequency and synchronicity of hand-holding by the Taipei dyads stand in stark contrast to the few attempts to initiate hand-holding by European-heritage mothers in Santa Cruz and their infants’ unwillingness to engage in such interaction (Fig. 2).
Parental guidance in Taipei, Taiwan, and Santa Cruz, California. A Chinese-heritage mother in Taipei (a) holds the infant’s hand to lower a tall cover over an object. In (b) a coenactment of hand-holding by a Taipei dyad, the mother holds the infant’s left hand to insert a round object. A European-heritage mother in Santa Cruz (c) rests her hands on the table while the infant acts on the short cover that the mother has placed on top of the object (see Wang, 2025). A Santa Cruz infant (d) acts on the toy while the mother watches him do so; in fact, the infant in this illustration is shown to have just resisted a hand-holding attempt by the mother (see Zhang et al., 2021). The left images (a, c) depict a contrast of parental guidance in the context in which 9-month-olds are taught the rule of height for covering events. The right images (b, d) depict a similar contrast in the context of operating a sort-and-spin toy.
Directive guidance is different from the parental scaffolding typically observed with European-heritage middle-class families that tends to emphasize children’s exploration and personal freedom while minimizing parental intervention. Directive guidance encourages children to seek and incorporate guidance and to collaborate with others toward the shared goal. Furthermore, directive guidance manifests in different ways depending on the context of the activity. For example, Chinese-heritage caregivers in another study asked their 2.5- to 4-year-olds more instructional questions than their European-heritage counterparts to manage children’s attention and guide their action (Wang & Basch, 2024). Crucially, this pattern was more prominent when the dyads faced a task with a right or wrong answer. In the context of an open-ended task, Chinese-heritage caregivers instead used one-right answer questions to narrow the scope of the task. H. Lin et al. (2025) further showed that Chinese-heritage parents in Taiwan readily gave instructions to their 3- to 6-year-olds during screen-media activities, including gaming and video viewing, without children’s request for help. The children reciprocated by sharing their progress on an educational game, although less sharing was observed when they played a noneducational game. The parental provision of instructions was more prevalent during gaming activities than video viewing. These results echoed the pattern of directive guidance and context specificity in the studies with infants and younger children.
A caveat is necessary to note regarding the assumption that individuals from the same cultural group adhere to cultural practices to similar degrees. Rather than making this assumption, researchers could instead measure parental adherence to cultural practices, examine potential within-group variation, clarify the complexity of cultural practices, and enable a stronger methodology for the culture-first approach. Research that examines individual variation within a cultural group can provide further insight into the interplay of learning, interaction, and context. Furthermore, expanding the time scale, for example, by examining intergenerational similarities and differences in cultural practices (Rogoff & Aceves-Azuara, 2024) will enable researchers to treat culture as a dynamic process in time and place.
Connecting to Theories of Learning and Development
How do the findings from Wang (2025) connect to theories of how infants learn physical rules? A prominent account to mention is explanation-based learning (EBL; Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017). According to EBL, infants learn physical rules in three key steps. Step 1 involves noticing contrastive outcomes among otherwise similar physical events. For example, to learn about height being deterministic for covering events, infants need to notice that when a rigid cover is lowered over an object, the object becomes fully hidden under one cover but remains partly visible under another cover. This leads infants to search for crucial information about an object feature (e.g., height) that can be mapped onto the outcomes. Step 2 requires infants to build an explanation on the basis of the identified feature while disregarding irrelevant features. For example, infants recognize that a tall object cannot extend to its full height underneath a short cover because of principles of object solidity and continuity (Y. Lin et al., 2022). This leads them to establish a candidate rule: To fully hide an object, the cover must be as tall as or taller than the object.
EBL is completed with Step 3—verifying the candidate rule with additional evidence. Once verified, the rule can then be adopted for the future prediction or interpretation of physical events. For example, infants need to see another pair of covers instantiating the candidate rule to apply the rule to subsequent events. Without hands-on experience, infants at 9 months learned the rule of height after watching two or more pairs of covers instantiating the rule, but a single pair of covers did not suffice. However, with hands-on experience, a single pair of covers was adequate. In Wang (2025), a search task was administered to examine infants’ learning of the physical rule as an outcome measure. Across the two sites (Taipei and Santa Cruz), the 9-month-olds chose the cover that was tall enough to fully hide a toy when searching for the toy in the test phase. There was no group difference in the outcome; both groups of babies learned the rule despite the differences in parental guidance. The finding indicated that hands-on exploration may have expanded infants’ experience by creating multiple instances with a single pair of covers, thus completing Step 3 of EBL.
The inclusion of the outcome measure in Wang (2025) warrants immediate discussion. The finding demonstrates that meaningful knowledge can be gained from analyzing individual and dyadic behaviors selected through a cultural analysis without a cross-group difference in the outcome measure. Specifically, the analysis pointed to directive guidance behaviors as a justifiable choice of examination. Indeed, the research brought to light distinct patterns of behaviors that are rooted in cultural ideologies and practices to uncover diverse pathways of learning in infancy. On the other hand, the inclusion of the outcome measure to assess learning consequences of parental guidance across groups seems to align with the deficit-oriented perspective. However, as the paper pointed out, the inclusion of the outcome measure was “the secondary purpose of the study . . . to examine the benefits of hands-on experience for early development of physical concepts. . . . Thus, the scope of this work was not to determine which scaffolding strategy is better” (p. 21). It should also be noted that the task focused on a simple reach behavior commonly observed with infants.
Implications of Placing Culture at the Core of Learning
How does the culture-first approach contribute meaningful knowledge to the field and inform learning theories without cross-group differences in the learning outcome? Cultural analysis brings into theoretical consideration two crucial facets of learning: hands-on experience and parent-child interaction (Fig. 3).
Cultural process of developing strengths for learning in early childhood. In the culture-first approach, cultural analysis leads researchers to select behaviors to measure across activity contexts to identify cultural patterns that contribute to early learning. The process by which children develop strengths for learning is clarified through examining two crucial facets of learning. Hands-on experience provides opportunities for researchers to delineate how active exploration facilitates learning in culturally distinct ways. Parent-child interaction shifts learning from an individual act to a coenactment of negotiation and collaboration, enabling researchers to bridge cognitive, social, and emotional domains of child development.
First, hands-on experience supports learning more than observation alone. This is because infants benefit from flows of information across modalities when exploring objects (Bahrick et al., 2004). Multimodal exploration, specifically the pairing of self-generated visual and tactile information, facilitates infants’ encoding of object features and spatial reasoning (Antrilli & Wang, 2016; Möhring & Frick, 2013). Crucially, cultural analysis brings learning theories to the “wild,” in which learning occurs in messier situations. It allows researchers to delineate where the benefits of “messiness” come from. Wang (2025) showed that a 9-month-old could engage in various actions with a single pair of covers. The infant might play with the covers for a few seconds, shift to exploring the tall cover with the object, and finally play with the short cover and the object. In this way, a single exemplar is broken into smaller episodes that differ in action sequences, and each episode is encoded as a distinct instance, thereby multiplying the number of exemplars that infants observe and allowing Step 3 of EBL (verification of the candidate rule) to be completed. Another contender mechanism underlying the benefits of hands-on experience is comparison (Ferry et al., 2015; Gentner et al., 2007; Goldman & Wang, 2019) because Wang (2025) showed that infants who learned the rule all engaged in comparative play, acting on two items simultaneously.
Second, parent-child interaction shifts infants’ learning from an individual act to a coenactment of negotiation and collaboration that affords a variation of action sequences. It expands the possibility for infants to break a single exemplar into different mini sequences. Crucially, cultural analysis takes learning theories beyond the cognitive domain to integrate individual and sociocultural aspects of learning. By starting with the question of what drives cultural ways of learning—the cultural rationale underlying the dos and don’ts of caregiver practices, culture is placed at the core of scientific inquiry to unveil the relations among cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of learning. Learning is typically construed as a cognitive problem in psychological science. The culture-first approach potentiates researchers to bridge cognitive and socioemotional domains of development that are intertwined in everyday interaction. Researchers might find it generative to cross disciplinary lines in specifying the cultural core of learning, for example, by integrating work in sociolinguistics or anthropology into psychological research. Future research taking the culture-first approach could also combine ethnographic observation of cultural practices with quantitative measurement of behavioral alignment with the practices. Crossing methodological boundaries further enables the field to conduct research that treats culture as a dynamic process rather than demographic variables or static routines.
Conclusion
Placing culture at the core of learning, rather than treating culture as a layer added to a generic process, provides opportunities for identifying diverse profiles of effective support for early learning. It removes the need for identifying a better way to learn and brings to light how everyday practices foster learning for children from different communities, thus breaking away from deficit views. Important insights to creating a supportive environment for young learners have been identified with similar outcomes between groups (Sperry et al., 2019; Yoshida et al., 2019). For example, similar levels of support for language learning were provided to monolingual and bilingual infants through different profiles of verbal environments (Sun et al., 2022). Pluralizing the definitions of learning and profiles of effective support for scientific inquiry in psychology will elevate research impacts, increasing the possibility for the strengths of all learners to be recognized and leveraged amid structural conditions in which learning “in the wild” resides (Miller et al., 2024). By crossing theoretical, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries, researchers in psychology are better positioned to produce knowledge that has equitable impacts on children and families from diverse backgrounds.
Recommended Reading
Miller, P. J., Sperry, D. E., & Sperry, L. L. (2024). (See References). Provides an interdisciplinary look at deficit narratives of language development and makes methodological recommendations to heed structural inequalities in scientific inquiry.
Rogoff, B., & Aceves-Azuara, I. (2024). (See References). Exemplifies the sociocultural approach to examining intergenerational similarities and variations of cultural practices in an indigenous community.
Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Masek, L. R. (2023). (See References). Provides a systems approach to studying learning and the interplay of infant behavior, caregiver response, and environmental contexts.
