The current investigations coordinate math cognition and cultural approaches to numeric thinking to examine the linkages between numeric and spatial processes, and how these linkages are modified by the cultural artifact of writing. Previous research in the adult numeric cognition literature has shown that English monoliterates have a spatialised mental number line which is oriented from left-to-right with smaller magnitudes associated with the left side of space and larger magnitudes are associated with the right side of space. These associations between number and space have been termed the Spatial Numeric Association Response Code Effect (SNARC effect, Dehaene, 1992). The current study investigates the spatial orientation of the mental number line in the following groups: English monoliterates, Arabic monoliterates who use only the right-left writing system, Arabic-English biliterates, and illiterate Arabic speakers who only read numerals. Current results indicate, for the first time, a Reverse SNARC effect for Arabic monoliterates, such that the mental number line had a right-to-left directionality. Furthermore, a weakened Reverse SNARC was observed for Arabic-English biliterates, and no effect was observed among Illiterate Arabic speakers. These findings are especially notable since left-right biases are neurologically supported and are observed in pre-literate children regardless of which writing system is used by adults. The broader implications of how cultural artifacts affect basic numeric cognition will be discussed.

The Living in History (LiH) effect is a litmus test for the degree to which historical events reorganise autobiographical memory. The LiH effect was studied in two Lebanese samples: a Beiruti sample that lived in the epicentre of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and another group from the Bi'qa region who lived in an area that was indirectly exposed for most of the civil war but experienced one short-term period of war during the Israeli invasion. Using the two-phase word-cueing task to elicit dated autobiographical memories, we observed a significantly stronger LiH effect in the Beirut sample but also a significant yet weaker LiH effect in the Bi'qa sample. In addition to the main finding we offer evidence that the LiH effect waxes and wanes with the level of conflict in an area and that reported personal experiences of war exposure predict the strength of the LiH effect. Our findings suggest that collective transitional events which produce a marked change in the fabric of daily living engender historically defined autobiographical periods which give structure and organisation to how individuals remember their past.

Contemporary psychologists in the Arabic-speaking world remain deeply concerned with many of the same foundational issues that have impeded the development of sustainable research traditions since at least the 1950s. As a means of assessing historical and current trends in regional research practices, the project reported in this article employs a content analysis method to assess the cultural sensitivity of peer-reviewed English-language empirical studies conducted on peoples of the Arabic-speaking world. Results suggest that cultural sensitivity is quite low on many of the dimensions assessed, including whether/how findings are applied to everyday settings, validity of methodological procedures employed, the way cultural contributions to psychological processes are discussed, the local relevance of conclusions drawn from empirical findings, and how theories and concepts are transferred from mainstream (Western) psychology. The current findings are used to suggest some strategic and potentially controversial connections between culturally sensitive research and developing an appropriate psychology.

The study of numerical magnitude processing provides a unique opportunity to examine interactions between phylogenetically ancient systems of semantic representations and those that are the product of enculturation. While nonsymbolic representations of numerical magnitude are processed similarly by humans and nonhuman animals, symbolic representations of numerical magnitude (e.g., Hindu-Arabic numerals) are culturally invented symbols that are uniquely human. Here, we report a comparison of symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical magnitude processing in two groups of participants who differ substantially in their level of literacy. In this study, level of literacy is used as an index of level of school-based numeracy skill. The data from these groups demonstrate that while the processing of nonsymbolic numerical magnitude (numerical distance effect) is unaffected by an individual's level of literacy, the processing of Hindu-Arabic numerals differs between literate and illiterate individuals who live in a literature culture and have limited symbolic recognition skills. These findings reveal that nonsymbolic numerical magnitude processing is unaffected by enculturation, while the processing of numerical symbols is modulated by literacy.

Children’s sense and reasoning about territory and land ownership may develop differently in contexts of poverty and where narratives of dispossession are a part of daily life and are of political and historical significance, as is the case in the Palestinian refugee context in Lebanon. In this study we looked at how 3- and 5-year-old refugee Palestinian and American children distribute land among neighbors disputing over an unoccupied piece of land separating their properties. Children were required to make distributive justice decisions about 4 scripted scenarios that involved a pretend conflict between different types of neighbors (rich/poor; ingroup vs. outgroup; neighbors of the same material wealth and neighbors that were either poor or rich as well as ingroup members). Both 5-year-old Palestinian and American children showed inequality aversion, favoring the poor neighbor over the rich in their distributive justice decisions. This first finding suggests that being born into poverty does not make young children more sensitive to material inequity, even if the object of dispute is of particular cultural relevance. However, a second main finding suggests that extreme circumstances potentially translate into enhanced ingroup partialities, above and beyond the universal normative trend toward inequity aversion.