The aim of the research work presented here is to understand the relationship between culture and cognition.
Historically the development of this field has essentially relied on work carried out with children as subjects(Carraher, Carraher, Schliemann 1985) or adults (Lave, 1977 ; Greenfield et Childs, 1977) who have had little or no schooling and belong to cultural spheres often characterised by their distance from the reference point of a dominant Western culture, that of the well-educated. Traditionally centred on knowledge developed outside of the school system, the importance of school-based variables must not be completely ruled out from the process of conceptualization. We thus focussed our interest on both the roles of written culture and the teaching and
learning strategies involved, in the sense that these can generate specific obstacles to conceptualization. The originality here is that we are interested in well-read adults as subjects, the majority of whom have a level of at least three years of university education, and some of whom some are already professionals. With regard to the field work data, these were gathered through short clinical-style interviews as well as a questionnaire based survey taken from an observational sample. Since we were interested in finding regularities linked with conceptual strength, we used SIA (Statistical Implicative Analysis) which enabled us to determine the implicative rules between the responses and thus the pre-ordered structures revealing the associated responses. Our results showed that specific symbolic representations linked with specific aspects of the concept constitute
didactical and/or socio-cultural obstacles.