Attention and memory have been shown to differ across cultures, with independent Western cultures preferring an object-based feature analysis and interdependent Eastern cultures preferring a context-based holistic analysis. In two experiments, we assessed whether these cultural differences not only affect how much information is remembered, but also the specificity of memory such that the feature analysis preference of Americans should lead to greater memory for visual detail. Americans and East Asians incidentally encoded pictures of single items (Exp 1) and pictures of focal items presented against a meaningful background (Exp 2). On a recognition test, participants made same, similar, or new decisions about items (Exp 1 & 2) and backgrounds (Exp 2) that were the same as or similar to the encoded stimuli, as well as novel lures. As predicted, Americans exhibited greater accuracy than East Asians in specific memory for objects presented alone and this trend continued across both objects and backgrounds when objects were depicted in context. The two cultural groups did not differ in general (item-level) memory. These results support the idea that the feature analysis biases of Westerners may increase the specificity of visual information contained in memory, despite equivalent item-level memory.

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These results suggest that when information relevant to unbiased decision making was made more accessible, both older and younger adults were able to reduce susceptibility to the framing effect.

Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies report that moment-to-moment variability in the BOLD signal is related to differences in age and cognition and, thus, may be sensitive to age-dependent decline. However, head motion and/or cardiovascular health (CVH) may contaminate these relationships. We evaluated relationships between resting-state BOLD variability, age, and cognition, after characterizing and controlling for motion-related and cardiovascular influences, including pulse, blood pressure, BMI, and white matter hyperintensities (WMH), in a large (N = 422) resting-state fMRI sample of cognitively normal individuals (age 43–89). We found that resting-state BOLD variability was negatively related to age and positively related to cognition after maximally controlling for head motion. Age relationships also survived correction for CVH, but were greatly reduced when correcting for WMH alone. Our results suggest that network-based machine learning analyses of resting-state BOLD variability might yield reliable, sensitive measures to characterize age-related decline across a broad range of networks. Age-related differences in resting-state BOLD variability may be largely sensitive to processes related to WMH burden.

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