14 DAY TRIAL // Being East Asian is more than the almond eye, yellowish skin, sushi, rice, soy sauce and the weird glyphs. The brain works differently! A new MIT research published in "Psychological Science" shows how the Westerners and the East Asian people use their brains differently when facing the same visual perceptual issue.
In American culture, the individual value is the most important, that's why it focuses on the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian cultures value the collective and focus on objects' contextual interdependence. These cultural differences were shown to affect memory and perception; the new research shows how they also impact the brain activity patterns.
The researchers put 10 East Asians recently arrived in the US and 10 Americans to solve perceptual tasks, while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The participants watched a sequence of stimuli, made of lines within squares, and were put to compare each stimulus with the previous one.
In some tests, they they had to asses if the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (individual objects independent of context), while the other tests put the subjects to determine if the lines had the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (interdependent objects).
Many studies had shown that Americans performed better on absolute judgements, and East Asians on relative judgements. In the case of this investigation, the tasks were of decreased difficulty, that's why the groups had similar scores, while brain activity was a different story.
Americans solving relative judgements, more difficult for them, displayed higher activity in brain areas connected to attention-demanding cognitive tasks; these areas were significantly less active when making the easier for them absolute judgements. East Asians' brains displayed an opposite tendency, turning on brain's attention nuclei for absolute judgements.
"We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain's attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone", said lead author Trey Hedden, a research scientist at McGovern.
Individuals who were closer identified with their culture had a stronger pattern connected to their culture. "Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training", said co-author John Gabrieli, a professor at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.