A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Cognitive Styles in Chinese and American Children

Chiu, Lian-Hwang

doi:10.1080/00207597208246604

Cited by 285 publications

(223 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Even though many cultural differences are flexible to some degree, they appear to be acquired early in life (Chiu, 1972;Fernald & Morikawa, 1993;Imai & Gentner, 1997) and operate pervasively across a number of testing environments and tasks. Different information-processing biases across cultures could result from environmental affordances present in one's daily environment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural differences in neural function associated with object processing

Gutchess

Welsh

Boduroǧlu

et al. 2006

Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

219

135

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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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural differences in neural function associated with object processing

Gutchess

Welsh

Boduroǧlu

et al. 2006

Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

219

135

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“…Ji, Peng, and Nisbett (1999) found that Chinese participants were more capable of detecting covariation among arbitrary events than Americans, but more field dependent as indicated by the fact that they were more influenced by the position of the frame when judging the verticality of the rod in the Rod and Frame Test. In addition, Westerners learn arbitrary categories more readily using rules (Norenzayan, Nisbett, Smith, & Kim, 1999), make more use of categories for purposes of induction than do Asians (Choi, Nisbett, & Smith, 1997), are more likely to use categories for purposes of grouping objects than to use relationships among the objects (Chiu, 1972;Norenzayan, et al, 1999), and are more willing to set aside their preconceptions when these are contradicted by logical argument .…”

Section: Holistic Vs Analytic Epistemologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction.

Peng¹,

Nisbett²

1999

American Psychologist

1,386

1,508

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Chinese ways of dealing with seeming contradictions result in a dialectical or compromise approach-retaining basic elements of opposing perspectives by seeking a "middle way." European-American ways, on the other hand, deriving from a lay version of Aristotelian logic, result in a differentiation model that polarizes contradictory perspectives in an effort to determine which fact or position is correct. Empirical studies showed that dialectical thinking is a form of folk wisdom in Chinese culture: Chinese preferred dialectical proverbs containing seeming contradictions more than did Americans. Chinese were also found to prefer dialectical resolutions to social conflicts, and to prefer dialectical arguments over classical Western logical arguments. Furthermore, when two apparently contradictory propositions were presented, Americans polarized their views and Chinese were moderately accepting of both propositions. Origins of these cultural differences and their implications for human reasoning in general are discussed.

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“…Consider, for example, how cultural systems vary in their emphasis on individuals and relations. Although Westerners tend to favor taxonomic groupings and to focus on individuated entities isolated from context, non-Westerners tend to group objects in a relational-contextual manner ('mothers take care of babies and go together') and to focus on holistic systems of entities embedded in context [27,31,[44][45][46][47]. Relational approaches may support teleological responses precisely because they highlight ecological affordances and relations.…”

Section: Are Clouds 'For' Raining?mentioning

confidence: 99%