Abstract
Behavioral research suggests that Westerners focus more on objects, whereas East Asians attend more to relationships and contexts. We evaluated the neural basis for these cultural differences in an event-related fMRI study. East Asian and American participants incidentally encoded pictures of (1) a target object alone, (2) a background scene with no discernable target object, and (3) a distinct target object against a meaningful background. Americans, relative to East Asians, activated more regions implicated in object processing, including bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left superior parietal/angular gyrus, and right superior temporal/supramarginal gyrus. In contrast to the cultural differences in object-processing areas, few differences emerged in background-processing regions. These results suggest that cultural experiences subtly direct neural activity, particularly for focal objects, at an early stage of scene encoding.
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This research was supported by the National Institute on Aging Behavioral Research Program Grant R01 AG015047, the National Institute on Aging Neuroscience and Neuropsychology Program Grant R01AGO6265-15, and an APA Dissertation Research Award.
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Gutchess, A.H., Welsh, R.C., Boduroĝlu, A. et al. Cultural differences in neural function associated with object processing. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 6, 102–109 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.6.2.102
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.6.2.102