O que as listas-livres escondem? como as pessoas ordenam itens de um domínio cultural

Abstract

The free-list is known for being simple to apply when pursuit investigate cultural domains of different human groups. One of ethnobiological tools of data collection, and a variant of free-recall method developed by psychologists 50s, consist of ask people to list items belonging to any cultural domain that the researcher seeks to understand. The researchers assume that the first and most recurring items listed are the most important for the group investigated. Due to its facility, has been used by many other disciplines to identify culturally protruding elements as in ethnobiology. However, the cognitive foundations that allows the use of this method, the memory of the informant, involves complex encoding, memorization and recall processes, that can influence the structure and composition of a free-list. Accordingly, this paper assumes that the order of items of medicinal plants in a free-list is influenced by the dynamics of the individual memory systems, not necessarily for its cultural salience in the study population. We evaluate this method in a rural community of Pernambuco state, northeastern Brazil, followed by a series of questions to identify cognitive factors that influence the order of these lists: recent memory, episodic memory and grouping by similarity. The studied cognitive factors influence the structure and composition of listed items, in general the list retrieves the information based on recent and episodic memories uses. Thus, we suggest further work to use the list-free tool, consider such cognitive influences to minimize interpretive biases.