COMMENTARY: How Are Cultural-Historical Change and Individual Cognition Related?

The article comments on George Saxe and Indigo Esmonde's monograph on cultural change and individual cognition. To understand cultural and cognitive changes, one must conduct longitudinal studies of the mutual influence between cultural-historical change and individual cognitive change. Geoffrey Saxe's work on adaptive changes in the Oksapmin body-part counting system of number due to the shift from the subsistence economy to money economy in the Oksapmin community is seminal in the field of culture and cognition research. His data were obtained from the comparison among those people who had the same cultural background but had different extent of exposure to the new economy.