N400 incongruity effect in an episodic memory task reveals different strategies for handling irrelevant contextual information for Japanese than European Canadians

Abstract

East Asians/Asian Americans show a greater N400 effect due to semantic incongruity between foreground objects and background contexts than European Americans (Goto, Ando, Huang, Yee, & Lewis, 2010). Using analytic attention instructions, we asked Japanese and European Canadians to judge, and later, remember, target animals that were paired with task-irrelevant original (congruent), or novel (incongruent) contexts. We asked: (1) whether the N400 also shows an episodic incongruity effect, due to retrieved contexts conflicting with later-shown novel contexts; and (2) whether the incongruity effect would be more related to performance for Japanese, who have been shown to have more difficulty ignoring such contextual information. Both groups exhibited episodic incongruity effects on the N400, with Japanese showing more typical N400 topographies. However, incongruent-trial accuracy was related to reduction of N400s only for the Japanese. Thus, we found that the N400 can reflect episodic incongruity which poses a greater challenge to Japanese than European Canadians.

Cue Reactivity in Nicotine and Alcohol Addiction: A Cross-Cultural View

“…Further, huge evidence about cognitive differences between East and West with respect to emotion such as semantic affective processing (Goto et al, 2013) and expression of emotion with the N400 (Liu et al, 2015), and emotion suppression by the parietal late positive potential (Murata et al, 2012) indicating that Easterners are more sensitive to the relationship between context and objects than Westerners. In addition to emotion, the most discussed was cultural differences in self-construal which may be different from the processing of the emotion by the differences in N400, P3 and the early component N170 in various conditions (Lewis et al, 2008; Vizioli et al, 2010; Masuda et al, 2014). …”

Cultural differences in visual object recognition in 3-year-old children

“…The relevant cross-cultural studies have primarily focused on the processing of scenes (visual arrays composed of multiple objects) and have used a variety of measures, including recognition measures (Ishii, Tsukasaki, & Kitayama, 2009; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Masuda & Nisbett, 2006), eye-tracking (Chua, Boland, & Nisbett, 2005; Kelly, Miellet, & Caldara, 2010; Masuda, Ellsworth, Mesquita, Leu, Tanida, & de Veerdonk, 2008) and brain imaging (Goh, Hebrank, Sutton, Chee, Sim, & Park, 2013; Han & Northoff, 2008; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Masuda, Russell, Chen, Hioki, & Caplan, 2014). The findings show consistent differences in how western adults (residing in North America, Europe) and eastern adults (residing in China, Japan, Korea) process visual information.…”

Cultural differences in visual attention: Implications for distraction processing

“…Our results also demonstrate that contextual information encoded and carried over to new tasks can improve performance in certain circumstances. Previous studies have typically focused on how such information can hinder performance when it interferes with future task demands – for example, when old items on a memory task are displayed with new backgrounds (Chua et al ., ; Masuda & Nisbett, ; Masuda et al ., ). Here, we show that, in participants of East Asian descent, previous background irrelevant information boosts subsequent task performance when it becomes relevant, consistent with the pattern typically seen in Western older adults (Amer & Hasher, ; Biss et al ., ; Campbell, Hasher, & Thomas, ; Rowe et al ., ).…”

“…Previous studies exploring cultural differences between East Asians and Westerners have mostly used instructions that allowed free allocation of attention (Fu, Dienes, Shang, & Fu, ; Kiyokawa, Dienes, Tanaka, Yamada, & Crowe, ; Masuda et al ., for exceptions). The two studies reported here used instructions that urged participants to focus on one aspect of a task (colour of words in Experiment 1 and repetition detection of a picture in Experiment 2) in the face of distracting words.…”

“…For example, East Asians show poorer recognition of previously seen objects that are shown with a new background relative to the original or no background; Westerners are not influenced by this manipulation (Chua et al, 2005;Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). In addition, the extent to which participants recognize the new object-background pairing, as revealed by the N400 incongruity effect, is negatively correlated with East Asians' performance only (Masuda, Russell, Chen, Hioki, & Caplan, 2014), consistent with the notion that previous contextual information plays an important role in related subsequent tasks more so for East Asians than for Western participants.…”