Gutchess Angela H, Welsh Robert C, Boduroglu Aysecan, Park Denise C
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2006 Jun;6(2):102-9. doi: 10.3758/cabn.6.2.102.
Behavioral research suggests that Westerners focus more on objects, whereas East Asians attend more to relationships and contexts. We evaluated the neural basis for these cultural differences in an event-related fMRI study. East Asian and American participants incidentally encoded pictures of (1) a target object alone, (2) a background scene with no discernable target object, and (3) a distinct target object against a meaningful background. Americans, relative to East Asians, activated more regions implicated in object processing, including bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left superior parietal/angular gyrus, and right superior temporal/supramarginal gyrus. In contrast to the cultural differences in object-processing areas, few differences emerged in background-processing regions. These results suggest that cultural experiences subtly direct neuralactivity, particularly for focal objects, at an early stage of scene encoding.
行为研究表明，西方人更关注物体，而东亚人则更关注关系和情境。我们在一项事件相关功能磁共振成像研究中评估了这些文化差异的神经基础。东亚和美国参与者偶然对以下图片进行编码：(1) 单独的目标物体，(2) 没有可辨认目标物体的背景场景，以及 (3) 有意义背景下的独特目标物体。相对于东亚人，美国人激活了更多与物体处理相关的区域，包括双侧颞中回、左侧顶上小叶/角回和右侧颞上回/缘上回。与物体处理区域的文化差异形成对比的是，背景处理区域几乎没有差异。这些结果表明，文化体验在场景编码的早期阶段微妙地引导神经活动，尤其是对于焦点物体。
