Cultural differences in the visual processing of meaning: Detecting incongruities between background and foreground objects using the N400

Abstract

East Asians have been found to allocate relatively greater attention to background objects, whereas European Americans have been found to allocate relatively greater attention to foreground objects. This is well documented across a variety of cognitive measures. We used a modification of the Ganis and Kutas (2003) N400 event-related potential design to measure the degree to which Asian Americans and European Americans responded to semantic incongruity between target objects and background scenes. As predicted, Asian Americans showed a greater negativity to incongruent trials than to congruent trials. In contrast, European Americans showed no difference in amplitude across the two conditions. Furthermore, smaller magnitude N400 incongruity effects were associated with higher independent self-construal scores. These data suggest that Asian Americans are processing the relationship between foreground and background objects to a greater degree than European Americans, which is consistent with hypothesized greater holistic processing among East Asians. Implications for using neural measures, the role of semantic processing to understand cultural differences in cognition, and the relationship between self construal and neural measures of cognition are discussed.

Culture, Mind, and the Brain: Current Evidence and Future Directions

“…One might expect that when a focal object (e.g., a car) is placed in a context that does not go together (e.g., an oceanic scene), Asian Americans might be more prone to detecting the incongruity than European Americans due to their relative sensitivity to context. This in fact was the case in a recent study by Goto et al (2009) and, moreover, as may be predicted, the N400 was reliably associated with interdependent self-construal as assessed by the Triandis scale. In yet another related study, Ishii et al (2009) …”

Culture modulates the temporal dynamics of global/local processing

“…The P1 is a positive deflection peaking roughly 100 ms after stimulus onset on the occipital scalp surface, larger for attended than unattended information. Surprisingly, studies directly comparing two groups of observers did not reveal differences on this component (Goto et al 2010;Lewis et al 2008). For example, Goto et al (2010) manipulated the semantic incongruity between objects and scenes.…”

“…Surprisingly, studies directly comparing two groups of observers did not reveal differences on this component (Goto et al 2010;Lewis et al 2008). For example, Goto et al (2010) manipulated the semantic incongruity between objects and scenes. They only observed cultural differences in the ERP amplitudes at later stages of information processing (i.e., N400 components; Kutas and Hillyard 1980;Holcomb and Neville 1991).…”

How culture gets embrained: Cultural differences in event-related potentials of social norm violations

“…We test the hypothesis that the N400 is a neural marker of norm violation detection and its amplitude in response to social norm violations will be greater in tight (e.g., Chinese) compared with loose (e.g., American) cultures. Building on the findings of cultural (East Asian vs. Western) influences on the N400 in a variety of social incongruity tasks (9,(12)(13)(14), we expect that responses to social norm violations will differ between cultures, but responses to nonsocial incongruencies, such as purely semantic…”