A cultural lens on Yucatec Maya families' COVID-19 experiences.

Health guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic led families around the world to spend more time isolated together, disrupting leisure activities, schooling, social interactions, and family work (UNICEF, 2021). Using the lens of Yucatec Maya families' cultural values and practices, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 Yucatec Maya rural women in Mexico (M  = 32; and for comparison, 13 middle-class European-American women (M  = 41)), with children 6-7 years old, to analyze families' experiences during the pandemic. Faced with the same isolation as in the United States, our exploratory analysis revealed Maya families experienced external stresses but at the same time were generally comfortable with their children's everyday activities and their social-emotional well-being, illuminating consequences of the communities' cultural theories about development.

Cultural and Developmental Influences on Overt Visual Attention to Videos.

Top-down influences on observers' overt attention and how they interact with the features of the visual environment have been extensively investigated, but the cultural and developmental aspects of these modulations have been understudied. In this study we investigated these effects for US and Yucatec Mayan infants, children, and adults. Mayan and US participants viewed videos of two actors performing daily Mayan and US tasks in the foreground and the background while their eyes were tracked.

Child-directed teaching and social learning at 18 months of age: evidence from Yucatec Mayan and US infants.

In several previous studies, 18-month-old infants who were directly addressed demonstrated more robust imitative behaviors than infants who simply observed another's actions, leading theorists to suggest that child-directed interactions carried unique informational value. However, these data came exclusively from cultural communities where direct teaching is commonplace, raising the possibility that the findings reflect regularities in infants' social experiences rather than responses to innate or a priori learning mechanisms. The current studies consider infants' imitative learning from child-directed teaching and observed interaction in two cultural communities, a Yucatec Mayan village where infants have been described as experiencing relatively limited direct instruction (Study 1) and a US city where infants are regularly directly engaged (Study 2).