Abstract
Evidence for cross-cultural response biases is now relatively ubiquitous in psychological research, however the idea that cultural differences might influence neurocognitive performance remains relatively underexplored. We objectively measured different response strategies of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children using signal detection theory to examine whether the way they responded (measured as response bias) might affect their perceived visual working memory ability (measured as detection sensitivity). We conceptualised response bias as whether children responded more liberally or conservatively when determining whether they observed a change in temporally-presented change-detection stimuli. We present quantitative evidence that remote Indigenous children employ more conservative decision making strategies than non-Indigenous children when completing visual working memory tasks. Evidence presented here of cross-cultural differences in decision-making during cognitive performance highlights the importance of considering cross-cultural differences when conducting cognitive research, and suggests a need to evaluate whether such differences may affect task performance. This evidence also highlights the need to evaluate whether such differences may affect task performance in applied settings, for example within the domain of literacy acquisition.
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Notes
ABS Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage is an ordinal ranked percentile measure of socio-economic conditions, with a percentile ranking of 1 being the lowest end of the rankings, and a percentile ranking of 100 being the highest (ABS, 2018).
Although the use of the term ‘clan’ is contentious amongst some Australian Indigenous groups, this is used with legitimacy by Indigenous people of the Thamarrurr region to identify and refer to descent groups and traditional custodians of this region (Taylor, 2004).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge and thank Rosa Tipiloura and Alliyanna Tipiloura for assisting the first author with data collection. We would also like to acknowledge and thank all students who participated in our study, and the teaching staff for facilitating our research. Thank you also to Maria Borzycki and Deborah Apthorp for assistance with programming.
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This research was funded by an Australian Government Research Training Scholarship, awarded to the first author.
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Freire, M.R., Pammer, K. Influence of culture on visual working memory: evidence of a cultural response bias for remote Australian Indigenous children. J Cult Cogn Sci 4, 323–341 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-020-00063-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-020-00063-4