Cultural Influences on Neural Substrates of Attentional Control

Authors: Hedden, Trey; Ketay, Sarah¹; Aron, Arthur¹; Rose Markus, Hazel²; Gabrieli, John D.E.³

Source: Psychological Science, Volume 19, Number 1, January 2008 , pp. 12-17(6)

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Abstract:

Behavioral research has shown that people from Western cultural contexts perform better on tasks emphasizing independent (absolute) dimensions than on tasks emphasizing interdependent (relative) dimensions, whereas the reverse is true for people from East Asian contexts. We assessed functional magnetic resonance imaging responses during performance of simple visuospatial tasks in which participants made absolute judgments (ignoring visual context) or relative judgments (taking visual context into account). In each group, activation in frontal and parietal brain regions known to be associated with attentional control was greater during culturally nonpreferred judgments than during culturally preferred judgments. Also, within each group, activation differences in these regions correlated strongly with scores on questionnaires measuring individual differences in culture-typical identity. Thus, the cultural background of an individual and the degree to which the individual endorses cultural values moderate activation in brain networks engaged during even simple visual and attentional tasks.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02038.x

Affiliations: 1: State University of New York at Stony Brook 2: Stanford University, 3: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and

Publication date: 2008-01-01