Mind across Cultures
Culture, the experience immersing in a set of tradition, a cluster of shared values, and a pattern of social feedback, shapes our thoughts and actions tremendously. As a psychologist with international experience, I've always been fascinated by the way culture impacts what information gets prioritized and, finally, remembered. A large portion of my cross-cultural research focused on the generalizability of memory strategies in American and East Asian culture. The major methods and takeaways are extracted and shown here. For ​more details about the paradigms, please see this sample project.
Key methods:
Data collection:
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Computerized memory tasks, fMRI
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Cognitive and personality questionnaires (online and paper-and-pencil)
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Collarboration across sites in different countries
Data analysis:
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Quantitative (power analysis, ANOVA, t-tests, correlation & regression analysis)
​Individualism vs. Collectivism
The comparison between individualist vs. collectistic (sometimes called independent vs. interdependent) culture may sound familiar to you. North America and East Asian are two representative regions of the two value system respectively. Among all the interesting directions where discussion of this topic can go, I was most interested in how the "self" is viewed in the two cultures and their impacts on memory.
Individualistic (American)
Collectivistic (East Asian)
Markus & Kitayama (1991)
In Western cultures, which tend to encourage independence and personal success, the self is viewed as unique and fairly distinct from others. Such value of the self provides fertile soil for effective self-referencing, enhancing memory for self- over other-referenced information. In contrast, collectivistic cultures in East Asia usually value connectedness and integration of the self with others. The self is considered meaningful only when considered as a harmonious part of a community. Thus, the self-referencing strategy may not work as well in East Asia.
That is, because the self does not “stick out” as much (and thus serve as a less salient memory cue) in collectivistic cultures, we expected that self-referencing would be a less effective strategy for younger and older adults in East Asian culture. Our research showed that this is indeed the case...partially:
There appears to be a generational difference between the self-concepts of East Asian younger and older adults, Younger and older Americans exhibit similar memory pattern, whereas younger East Asians showed a pattern more like Americans than older East Asians, possibly due to increased exposure to Western culture. It could be that the younger cohort in East Asia was exposed to Western culture and hence developed different views of the self from the older generation. See here for more details about study design, graphed data, and test statistics.
Analytic vs. Holistic
The analytic vs. holisitc approach of information processing is another noteworthy way in which North American and East Asian cultures differ. While North Americans tend to examine different components independently, East Asians are more likely to focus on how components work together and form a configural relationship. This drives attention and further memory formation.
One outcome is that North Americans and East Asians show difference in memory specificity, the amount of detail a memory contains. For example, autobiographical memory of our American participants contained more details about their personal past such as the visual details of a scene, while such memory of our Chinese participants emphasize more on the general "gist" or theme of the past happenings.
Publications under this theme...
Below are some of my published investigations about memory across cultures.
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Zhang, W., Hong, I., Jackson, J., Tai, T., Goh, J., & Gutchess, A. (2019). Influence of culture and age on self-reference effect. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition.
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Zhang, W., Johndro, H., Budson, E. A., & Gutchess, A. (2019). Influence of self-referential mode on memory for aMCI patients. Cognitive Neurospsychology.
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Gutchess, A., Mukadam, N., Zhang, W., & Zhang, X. (2019). Influence of aging on memory across cultures. Invited chapter for J. Chiao, S-C., Li, R. Turner, S.Y. Lee-Tauler, & B. Pringle (Eds)., Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience and Global Mental Health. Oxford University Press.
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Zhang, W., Andrews-Hanna, J., & Gutchess, A. (under revision) Post-encoding functional connectivity differs across cultures.