title: Cultural differences in neural function associated with object processing.
abstract: 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 neuralactivity, particularly for focal objects, at an early stage of scene encoding.
authors.affiliation: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. agutchess@wjh.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Angela H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Gutchess
authors.forename: Robert C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Welsh
authors.forename: Aysecan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Boduroglu
authors.forename: Denise C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Park
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude / Q000208:ethnology*; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003469:Culture; D005060:Europe; D005202:Asia, Eastern; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014796:Visual Perception