Korean Mothers&#039; Cultural Mode of Attention in Mother-toddler Interactions (유아 자녀와의 상호 작용에서 한국 어머니가 보인 문화적 주의 편향성)

Jaehyeon Kim (김재현); Youngon Choi (최영은)

doi:10.35574/KJDP.2025.38.1.52778.52778

Korean Mothers' Cultural Mode of Attention in Mother-toddler Interactions

THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
2025, 38(1), pp.45~60
DOI : 10.35574/KJDP.2025.38.1.52778.52778
Publisher : The Korean Society For Developmental Psychology
Research Area : Social Science > Psychological Science
Received : January 15, 2025
Accepted : February 27, 2025
Published : March 15, 2025

Jaehyeon Kim ¹, Youngon Choi ¹

¹중앙대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Adults raised in East Asian cultures exhibit holistic attentional biases, focusing more on contextual information such as the background, compared to adults from North American cultures, who prioritize the foreground. Caregivers were observed to transmit these biases to the children. This study explored the cultural tendencies and attentional biases of caregivers in the rapidly changing Korean cultural context, and whether these tendencies and biases influenced the relational reasoning performance of their children aged 18 to 36 months. Analyses of 83 mothers showed that Korean mothers valued both individualism and horizontal collectivism but they emphasized the foreground over the background in scene descriptions, reflecting analytic attentional biases. However, no apparent influence of maternal cultural tendencies was observed in their child’s relational reasoning performance, suggesting that cultural influences may not yet play a direct role in development at this early stage.

KEYWORDS

Cultural Attentional Bias, Cultural Tendency, Causal Relational Reasoning, Mother-toddler Interaction

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