On Cross-Cultural Neuroscience

A week before, we talked about how culture is a key factor in almost all psychological components, including various cognitive processes. For example, the effects of culture on perception were mentioned in last week’s articles. This week’s articles are focusing on the differences in neural processes between people from different cultures. I think showing these differences is a very efficient way to prove the effects of culture.

One of the articles of this week is a research article that focuses on true and false memory retrieval. The research aims to put out the differences between American and Taiwanese people on false or true memory retrieval of chosen objects. When I started reading the article, I assumed that culture affects memory more indirectly. To be more specific, in terms of physical objects every culture has its unique productions, and people of that culture are very familiar with these objects. In terms of perception, I knew that our brain specializes in constantly perceived images. The Fusiform Face Area may be given as an example of this. However as I continued to read the article, even though the fusiform gyrus played an important role in the research, I learned that that is not the only difference caused by culture.

The research puts out various findings about the topic. It focuses on different brain areas, and one of the differences it puts out regarding memory retrieval happens in the medial temporal lobe and areas that are responsible for visual processing. It was seen that the neural activity patterns in this area showed opposite patterns between Americans and Taiwanese. Results also showed that Americans are usually more successful when it comes to recognizing the previously seen items and discriminating them from the lures when compared to Taiwanese. Results also may indicate that the differences may occur from not only cultural effects on memory retrieval but also the cultural effects on other cognitive processes such as monitoring.

What I was most fascinated about the research was that the culture affects more than our cognitive processes. It also affects the activity of different brain regions. I was also curious about if any assumptions can be made about certain cultures based on the results. For example, as the results also showed, different thought patterns can be seen in different cultures. I believe that these findings give us great clues about these certain cultures, but I also think that these cannot be the only determining factor about that culture. Still, it is fascinating to see the cultural component when analyzing the memory processes of a person. I think it indicates that we somehow carry our culture’s features with us to the extent that we are not even aware of.