2. A history of cross-cultural research on childhood learning

Zahra Halavani is a Master of Arts graduate in developmental psychology from Simon Fraser University, Canada. She worked at the Culture and Development Lab under the supervision of Dr. Tanya MacGillivray. Zahra’s research focuses on infant-caregiver communications across cultures. She also has a background in educational psychology, mental health knowledge translation, and the sociomoral development of infants.

Ivan Kroupin is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, US. As co-director of the Ecology of Mind project (Kunene region—Namibia/Angola), Ivan focuses on how urbanization and technology are reshaping our minds and wellbeing—and the evolutionary dynamics driving this transformation. This perspective informs and is informed by an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, integrating ideas and data from developmental biology, systems theory, cultural evolution, and cognitive science.

Akira Takada is Professor in the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. He has worked with/among groups of the San of southern Africa (particularly !Xun and ǂAkhoe in Namibia, G|ui and Gǁana in Botswana) since the late 1990s. He has published a number of books and articles, including Hunters Among Farmers: The !Xun of Ekoka (2022), and The Ecology of Playful Childhood: The Diversity and Resilience of Caregiver-Child Interactions among the San of Southern Africa (2020).

Jing Xu is a Research Scientist at the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, US. She is a cultural and cognitive anthropologist studying how culture and mind interact to shape child development in diverse geographic regions, historical periods and cross-cultural comparative contexts. She pursues interdisciplinary research, bringing together ethnography, experimental techniques, computational methods, and humanistic perspectives to study how humans become moral persons. She is the author of two monographs: The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (2017) and “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (2024).

Seth Oppong was Professor of Work and Cultural Psychology at the University of Botswana. During his prolific career, he focused on diverse research areas, including occupational health psychology, traffic psychology, psychological testing, the history of psychology, theoretical and philosophical psychology, meta-science with respect to psychological science, Indigenous and African psychology, and decolonizing early childhood development programming.

Natália Dutra is Associate Professor at Federal University of Pará, Brazil, in the Behavior Theory and Research Centre. She holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from Durham University, UK, and an MSc in Psychobiology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Her research currently focuses on the psychological mechanisms underlying human social learning and cooperation. Natália is also interested in open science and diversity in science.

Barry Hewlett is Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University, US. He has conducted research with children in Central and Eastern Africa since 1973. He is the author of eight books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Felix Riede is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. He works in a broad and inclusive cultural evolutionary framework. Focused on understanding the interactions between social learning, niche construction, and environmental change, he explores the role of children in human cognitive evolution, and the role of object play as a motor for material culture variation, innovation, and adaptation.

April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She specializes in the origins of art, language and modern cognition, Neanderthal lifeways, and the lives of children and adolescents in the Pleistocene. She is the author of Growing Up in the Ice Age, winner of the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists book prize.