No matter how brilliant, one person cannot achieve major technological innovations alone. Human progress relies upon our ability to think together, building beyond an existing foundation of cumulative cultural knowledge (Heinrich & Muthukrishna, 2024). From five-years-old, children show cooperative capacities fundamental to this collective success (Warneken et al., 2014; Fletcher et al., 2012). Yet, little is known about children’s capacity to pool mental resources with cooperative partners – if they can think together as interconnected nodes to surpass individual computational limits (Velez et al., 2022). Prior developmental research also does not fully address cross-cultural diversity in children’s cooperative strategy (Rogoff, 2014). Here, we investigate how pairs of children (N = 96 dyads) cooperate on a memory task across two cultural contexts – Nanyuki, Kenya and Beijing, China. We find that children flexibly employ different strategies based on the level of cognitive demand, pointing to an early capacity for strategic cognitive collaboration.