title: Cultural differences in visual attention: Implications for distraction processing.
abstract: We investigated differences between participants of East Asian and Western descent in attention to and implicit memory for irrelevant words which participants were instructed to ignore while completing a target task (a Stroop Task in Experiment 1 and a 1-back task on pictures in Experiment 2). Implicit memory was measured using two conceptual priming tasks (category generation in Experiment 1 and general knowledge in Experiment 2). Participants of East Asian descent showed reliable implicit memory for previous distractors relative to those of Western descent with no evidence of differences on target task performance. We also found differences in a Corsi Block spatial memory task in both studies, with superior performance by the East Asian group. Our findings suggest that cultural differences in attention extend to task-irrelevant background information, and demonstrate for the first time that such information can boost performance when it becomes relevant on a subsequent task.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada.|Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Tarek
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Amer
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada.|Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: K W Joan
authors.initials: KW
authors.lastname: Ngo
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada.|Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Lynn
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hasher
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001364:Awareness; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D060865:Repetition Priming; D057190:Stroop Test; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: attention; cultural differences; distractibility; implicit memory