Images of the Cognitive Brain Across Age and Culture

Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts

“…The results suggest that the Chinese devoted more brain or cognitive resources to object processing when the scenes were incongruent due to their enhanced sensitivity to the entire scene. This fi nding provides clear brain evidence that cultural differences in ventral visual function are not only limited to variations in attentional focus on objects and backgrounds separately, but are also associated with variations in processing of semantic relationships between object and contextual information during visual perception and visual recognition (Goh & Huang, 2012 ;. Taken together, we have presented compelling data suggesting that cultural experience affects cognitive and neural function in systematic and fundamental ways, with the observation that East Asians are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners, whereas Westerners have a tendency to process focal and discrete attributes of the visual environment.…”

“…The fMR-A paradigm provides a means of measuring differences in selectivity and specialization in the ventral visual cortex based on the reduction in brain activations towards repeated stimuli. This phenomenon provides an index of the brain's ability to detect similarity between stimuli, and refl ects the use of less neural resources to process information that is repeated (Goh & Huang, 2012 ). Using the fMR-A paradigm, Jenkins, Yang, Goh, Hong, and Park ( 2010 ) found that East Asians possess greater sensitivity to contextual information.…”