Cultural differences in performance on Eriksen’s flanker task

Abstract

Eriksen's zoom model of attention implies a trade-off between the breadth and resolution of representations of information. Following this perspective, we used Eriksen's flanker task to investigate culture's influence on attentional allocation and attentional resolution. In Experiment 1, the spatial distance of the flankers was varied to test whether people from Eastern cultures (here, Turks) experienced more interference than people from Western cultures (here, Americans) when flankers were further from the target. In Experiment 2, the contrast of the flankers was varied. The pattern of results shows that congruency of the flankers (Experiment 1) as well as the degree of contrast of the flankers compared with the target (Experiment 2) interact with participants' cultural background to differentially influence accuracy or reaction times. In addition, we used evidence accumulation modeling to jointly consider measures of speed and accuracy. Results indicate that to make decisions in the Eriksen flanker task, Turks both accumulate evidence faster and require more evidence than Americans do. These cultural differences in visual attention and decision-making have implications for a wide variety of cognitive processes.

Modern Assessments of Intelligence Must Be Fair and Equitable

“…These perspectives make the case that what people experience in their cultural context will influence their psychological orientations including their cognitive functions, their personal values, and their approaches to thinking and problem solving. For example, cultural differences have been shown to impact performance in cognitive tasks such as the Eriksen flanker task ( Gutchess et al 2021 ) which is known to involve g subprocesses related to executive control. Additional work has found cultural differences in perceptual and mnemonic performance ( Gutchess and Sekuler 2019 ).…”

Modern Assessments of Intelligence Must Be Fair and Equitable

“…These perspectives make the case that what people experience in their cultural context will influence their psychological orientations including their cognitive functions and their personal values and approaches to thinking and problem solving. For example, cultural differences have been shown to impact performance on cognitive tasks such as the Eriksen flanker task (Gutchess et al, 2021) which is known to involve g subprocesses related to executive control. Additional work has found cultural differences in perceptual and mnemonic performance (Gutchess & Sekuler, 2019).…”

Investigating the Geography of Thought Across Eleven Countries: Cross-Cultural Differences in Analytic and Holistic Cognitive Styles Using Simple Perceptual Tasks and Reaction Time Modeling

“…Despite a few studies analyzing cross-cultural differences beyond analytic/holistic cognition applied reaction time modeling (e.g., Amir et al, 2023;Gao et al, 2022;Gutchess et al, 2021), past research in this area has typically relied on raw, unprocessed reaction time as an indicator of cognitive style. Reaction time, however, not only indicates underlying latent traits but also other cognitive processes, such as psychomotor tempo, stimulus encoding, response carefulness, and working speed (Molenaar et al, 2015).…”