Wang Qi
Department of Human Development, Cornell University, MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4401, USA.
Cognition. 2009 Apr;111(1):123-31. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.01.004. Epub 2009 Feb 23.
Cross-cultural studies have shown that Asians exhibit less accessibility to episodic memories than Euro-Americans. This difference is often attributed to differential cognitive and social influences on memory retention, although there have been no empirical data concerning the underlying mechanism. Three studies were conducted to examine encoding and retention processes that may underlie the cultural difference in episodic recall. While Asians recalled fewer personal event episodes than Euro-Americans across different retention intervals, the two groups showed similar forgetting functions over time (Study 1). Asians also recalled fewer episodes of fictional events than Euro-Americans when the retention interval was kept to a minimum (Study 2). Finally, Asians perceived fewer discrete episodes than Euro-Americans when reading events in a narrative text (Study 3). Collectively, these findings suggest that the cultural difference in episodic recall may not be a mere consequence of memory retention but culture-specific perceptual processing and encoding. They have great theoretical, developmental, and clinical relevance.
跨文化研究表明，与欧美裔美国人相比，亚洲人提取情景记忆的能力较弱。这种差异通常归因于认知和社会因素对记忆保持的不同影响，尽管目前尚无关于潜在机制的实证数据。我们进行了三项研究，以检验可能导致情景回忆文化差异的编码和保持过程。在不同的保持间隔中，亚洲人回忆起的个人事件情节比欧美裔美国人少，不过两组在随时间推移的遗忘功能上表现相似（研究1）。当保持间隔最短时，亚洲人回忆起的虚构事件情节也比欧美裔美国人少（研究2）。最后，在阅读叙事文本中的事件时，亚洲人感知到的离散情节比欧美裔美国人少（研究3）。总体而言，这些发现表明，情景回忆中的文化差异可能不仅仅是记忆保持的结果，而是特定文化的感知加工和编码造成的。它们具有重大的理论、发展和临床意义。
