title: Cultural differences in the lateral occipital complex while viewing incongruent scenes.
abstract: Converging behavioral and neuroimaging evidence indicates that culture influences the processing of complex visual scenes. Whereas Westerners focus on central objects and tend to ignore context, East Asians process scenes more holistically, attending to the context in which objects are embedded. We investigated cultural differences in contextual processing by manipulating the congruence of visual scenes presented in an fMR-adaptation paradigm. We hypothesized that East Asians would show greater adaptation to incongruent scenes, consistent with their tendency to process contextual relationships more extensively than Westerners. Sixteen Americans and 16 native Chinese were scanned while viewing sets of pictures consisting of a focal object superimposed upon a background scene. In half of the pictures objects were paired with congruent backgrounds, and in the other half objects were paired with incongruent backgrounds. We found that within both the right and left lateral occipital complexes, Chinese participants showed significantly greater adaptation to incongruent scenes than to congruent scenes relative to American participants. These results suggest that Chinese were more sensitive to contextual incongruity than were Americans and that they reacted to incongruent object/background pairings by focusing greater attention on the object.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. ljjenkins@ucdavis.edu
authors.forename: Lucas J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Jenkins
authors.forename: Yung-Jui
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Joshua
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Goh
authors.forename: Ying-Yi
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Hong
authors.forename: Denise C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Park
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003469:Culture; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014481:United States; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D044465:White People; D055815:Young Adult