文化差異對記憶提取歷程的認知神經科學基礎

Abstract

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There is growing interest in how differences in culturally based social and cognitive environments influence the way people perceive and process the visual world. Converging behavioral and neuroimaging evidence indicates that individuals from collectivistic/interdependent sociocultural systems (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean) are more sensitive to contextual information, whereas individuals with individualistic/independent representation (e.g. North American) have a tendency to process focal and discrete objects of the environment. In this functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, we examined whether the neurocognitive processes of episodic memory were influenced by culture-related contextual bias. Specifically, Thirty-one Taiwanese and 31 Western participants were recruited and instructed to perform a surprised memory retrieval task 20 minutes after a memory encoding task wherein participants were asked to make animacy judgments for scenes in which the salient object was either congruent or incongruent with the background. During memory retrieval, participants were asked to view object-background scenes and to make an Old/New judgment to indicate whether they had seen the pairing during the previous encoding task. Each participant’s degree of endorsement of individualistic and collectivistic values was assessed by their self-report on the Singelis Self-Construal Scale (SCS). Taiwanese rated higher SCS scores than Westerners in collectivistic value and Westerners rated higher SCS scores than Taiwanese in individualistic value. The behavioral results showed that the Taiwanese participants outperformed their Western counterparts for incongruent object-background pairs, whereas the two groups revealed equivalent performance on congruent object-background pairs. The neuroimaging results demonstrated that Taiwanese showed greater activity than Western participants in left middle cingulate cortex during recall of incongruent scenes compare to congruent scenes. Moreover, across memory conditions, a pattern emerged of increased activity in ventral parietal regions for Taiwanese participants and in dorsal parietal and executive regions for Western participants. In sum, these results are consistent with the collectivistic-individualistic dichotomy, and suggest that culture influences the neurocognitive processes of memory retrieval.