Cultural learning

Cultural learning is the way a group of people or animals within a society or culture tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles can be greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people. Cross-cultural research in the past fifty years has primarily focused on differences between Eastern and Western cultures. Some scholars believe that cultural learning differences may be responses to the physical environment in the areas in which a culture was initially founded. These environmental differences include climate, migration patterns, war, agricultural suitability, and endemic pathogens. Cultural evolution, upon which cultural learning is built, is believed to be a product of only the past 10,000 years and to hold little connection to genetics. Cultural learning allows individuals to acquire skills that they would be unable to do independently throughout their lifetimes. Cultural learning is believed to be particularly important for humans. Humans are weaned at an early age compared to the emergence of adult dentition. The immaturity of dentition and the digestive system, the time required for growth of the brain, and the rapid skeletal growth needed for the young to reach adult height and strength mean that children have special digestive needs and are dependent on adults for a long period of time. This time of dependence also allows time for cultural learning to occur before passage into adulthood. The basis of cultural learning is based on; people create, remember, and deal with ideas. They understand and apply specific systems of symbolic meaning. Cultures have been compared to sets of control mechanisms, plans, recipes, rules, or instructions. Cultural differences have been found in academic motivation, achievement, learning style, conformity, and compliance. Cultural learning is dependent on innovation, or the ability to create new responses to the environment and the ability to communicate or imitate the behavior of others.