Behavioral research suggests that Westerners focus more on objects, whereas East Asians attend more to relationships and contexts. We evaluated the neural basis for these cultural differences in an event-related fMRI study. East Asian and American participants incidentally encoded pictures of (1) a target object alone, (2) a background scene with no discernable target object, and (3) a distinct target object against a meaningful background. Americans, relative to East Asians, activated more regions implicated in object processing, including bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left superior parietal/angular gyrus, and right superior temporal/supramarginal gyrus. In contrast to the cultural differences in object-processing areas, few differences emerged in background-processing regions. These results suggest that cultural experiences subtly direct neural activity, particularly for focal objects, at an early stage of scene encoding.

Previous research has shown that when processing visual scenes, Westerners attend to salient objects and East Asians attend to the relationships between focal objects and background elements. It is possible that cross-cultural differences in attentional allocation contribute to these earlier findings. In this article, the authors investigate cultural differences in attentional allocation in two experiments, using a visual change detection paradigm. They demonstrate that East Asians are better than Americans at detecting color changes when a layout of a set of colored blocks is expanded to cover a wider region and worse when it is shrunk. East Asians are also slower than Americans are at detecting changes in the center of the screen. The data suggest that East Asians allocate their attention more broadly than Americans. The authors consider potential factors that may contribute to the development of such attention allocation differences. Keywordsculture; East Asian; Western; cognition; attention; visual working memory; context Cross-cultural investigations of cognitive differences have suggested that East Asians and Westerners have different cognitive styles; East Asians tend to be more holistic and Westerners tend to be more analytic (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003;Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005). These cognitive style differences are manifested in scene processing, with Westerners attending more to focal objects and East Asians attending more to the background context. For instance, when American and Japanese participants describe briefly presented vignettes, the American descriptions focus on the salient focal objects and the Japanese descriptions focus more on background context and relationships between the focal objects and the background context (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). When asked to compare two consecutively presented images (the second a slight variant of the first) in a change blindness task, Americans detect more changes in focal objects while the Japanese detect more changes occurring in the backgrounds of the scenes . Finally, studies monitoring eye movements during scene encoding have demonstrated that Americans focus on focal objects sooner and longer than East Asians whose attention is oriented away from focal objects and toward backgrounds (Chua, Boland, & Nisbett, 2005 These studies demonstrate that cultural background influences how attention is distributed when viewing scenes. But what is the source of these differences? One possibility is that they reflect different cultural biases in what is considered as informative and worthy of report about scenes, especially when these scenes are presented briefly and there are time constraints on the judgments to be made. It is also possible that lower level attentional and working memory processes contribute to East-West differences in scene encoding. Here, we consider two factors that could contribute to cultural differences in scene viewing: (a) attentional breadth differences and (b) differences in how the relationships between elements in a display are ...

Background: It is commonly assumed that age-related stereotypes are more positive in East Asian cultures compared to Western cultures. However, research conducted in Western cultures has demonstrated that age-related stereotypes are multidimensional and their valence is content-dependent. Objective: In this study we investigated stereotypes about young and old adults, held by both young and old in the US and in China by focusing on the valence of age stereotypes across two content domains: social/emotional and mental/physical. The goal was to identify whether there were any cultural differences in age-related stereotypes in Chinese and American cultures. Methods: Both young and old Chinese and American participants were asked to describe typical young and typical old people. All responses were then coded for valence (positive/negative/neutral) and for content (mental/physical, social/emotional, other). Descriptors about young and old people were initially analyzed separately; then data were integrated to examine group tendencies to be more positive or negative for each target age group. Results: In both cultures, stereotypes reflected a shift from more positive to increasingly negative views of mental and physical traits as a function of aging. In social and emotional domains, stereotypes regarding old and young adults were relatively neutral, except for a small positive bias found among the young Chinese adults for both target age groups. Conclusion: Our results indicate that age-related beliefs regarding typical older adults are similar across East-Asian and Western cultures and that a global positive bias for old age in East-Asia is absent.

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Although substantial evidence exists showing a reliable reminiscence bump for personal events, data regarding retrieval distributions for public events have been equivocal. The primary aim of the present study was to address life-span retrieval distributions of different types of public events in comparison to personal events, and to test whether the existing accounts of the bump can explain the distribution of public events. We asked a large national sample to report the most important, happiest, and saddest personal events and the most important, happiest, saddest, most proud, most fearful, and most shameful public events. We found a robust bump corresponding to the third decade of life for the happiest and the most important positive but not for the saddest and most important negative personal events. For the most important public events, a bump emerged only for the two most frequently mentioned events. Distributions of public events cued with emotions were marked by recency. These results point to potential differences in retrieval of important personal and public events. While the life-script framework well accounts for the findings regarding important personal events, a chronologically retroactive search seem to guide retrieval of public events. Reminiscence bump observed for the two public events suggest that age-at-event affects recall of public events to the degree that the events are high-impact ones that dominate nation's collective memory. Results provide further evidence that the bump is not unitary and points to importance of event type and memory elicitation method with regard to competing explanations of the phenomenon.