Cultural differences in neural function associated with object processing

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.

Cultural Neuroscience: A Historical Introduction and Overview

“…One example comes from a cultural neuroscience study of memory in which researchers found that, although the surface observation of behavior was the same (participants from both Eastern and Western cultures remember objects just as well as the other), different neural regions supported the processes leading to these similar outcomes (Gutchess et al, 2006). Specifically, Easterners may see objects and their contexts as one percept whereas Westerners may separate objects from their context, suggesting that the two groups actually see and think about objects in different ways.…”

“…For example, although the STS responds regardless of the apparent culture of the target for whom a mental state inference is made, its magnitude varies depending on the match between the target's and perceiver's cultural affiliation . Perhaps more striking, even basic responses to visual stimuli in the occipital cortex-one of the best mapped regions in cognitive neuroscience-may vary in terms of which areas are active according to one's culture for simple object perception (e.g., Gutchess et al, 2006).…”

“…One study compared East Asians' and Americans' brain responses during the line judgment task (an adaptation of the classic rod-and-frame task measuring field dependence; Witkin & Goodenough, 1977) to assess the extent to which object-context perception related to brain responses across cultures (Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). In doing so, they found that East Asian study participants were characterized by a stronger response in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (an area that has been implicated in tasks requiring greater cognitive control-shown in red from three different views in Figure 3) when making judgments of absolute line length, which are advantaged by processing independent visual features, as opposed to judgments of relative line length, which are more closely aligned with interdependent and holistic processing of visual stimuli (see also Gutchess, Welsh, Boduroglu, & Park, 2006, for similar cultural differences in brain areas associated with visual processing). Notably, this difference diminished as a function of how acculturated the East Asian participants were to the U.S., suggesting that cultural exposure and values might mitigate cultural differences in perception at both cognitive and behavioral levels.…”

Cultural variations in virtual spaces design

“…Recent advances in neuroimaging techniques have strengthened the hypothesis that cultural differences influence also lower level cognitive tasks such as perception. Differences were evidenced in direct neural activity during perception tasks, particularly for focal objects at an early stage of stimuli encoding (Gutchess et al 2006). The brain parts activated by the same visual stimulation differed according to the perceiver's cultural background.…”

Brain, Behavior, and Culture: Insights from Cognition, Perception, and Emotion

“…In elaboration of this effect, Gutchess et al (2006) conducted an fMRI study in which East-Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans performed a memory task that included objects and scenes. Although both groups performed equally well, they showed differences in the brain regions they used to complete the task.…”