|
According to the latest results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, people from East Asian cultures use their brains differently from people immersed in American culture when solving the same visual mental tasks. The findings could have implications for understanding how culture affects behaviour. In work funded by the National Institutes of Health and supported by the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arthur Aron and Sarah Ketay of Stony Brook University, New York, together with colleague John Gabrieli at MIT, in Boston, and Trey Hedden and Hazel Rose Markus of Stanford University, California have demonstrated for the first time that a person's cultural upbringing and the extent to which one identifies with those cultural influences can affect brain activity patterns. Aron and colleagues report details of their research in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists have developed theories of culture over many years but are only now beginning to build on these concepts in psychological research. In the current study, Aron and his colleagues took the perspective that American culture values the individual and so emphasizes the independence of objects from their context. This, they explain contrasts with East Asian cultures that tend to emphasize the collective and interdependence of objects based on context. They tested the brain patterns of ten East Asians who had recently arrived in the USA and ten citizens born and raised there. The volunteers were given a mental task to carry out during the fMRI scan. Each participant made quick perceptual judgments related to the task and the researchers monitored their responses to the task, which purportedly tested their perception of the independence or interdependence of objects. The researchers wanted to find out whether the pattern of brain activity would differ when people from each culture were making judgments using the two kinds of rules. Thus they set a task that itself involved the participants looking at a series of diagrams, each consisting of a vertical line inside a box. Participants were to decide whether or not each square-and-line combination in a sequence matched the one before it, using one of two rules. One rule required them to ignore the context and match the absolute line lengths ignoring the size of the squares. The other rule required them to take the context into account and match the proportions of the lines to their squares. "Our major finding was that the frontal-parietal brain region known to be engaged during attention-demanding tasks was more activated for East Asians when making judgments ignoring context but was more activated for Americans when making judgments when they had to take context into account," says Aron, "The finding illustrates that each group engaged this attention system more strongly during a task more difficult for them because it is not generally supported by their cultural context." The researchers say in their report that the findings show how experience in, and identification with, a particular cultural context may shape brain responses associated with the basic process of control associated with attention. They go on to suggest that the fMRI results illustrate how cultural differences in the preferred and encouraged judgment style in the task powerfully influences brain function, completely reversing the relation between task and activation across a widespread brain network. Aron notes that ultimately the study findings complement those of behavioural studies and provide important and novel neurobiological insights into cultural differences. Another important finding was that the degree of this culture-specific brain-activation pattern was greatest for individuals who most strongly identified with their particular culture. To gauge cultural references, the researchers had participants answer a separate questionnaire on social and cultural identities. Related links: The views represented in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.
|
|
