Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2010 Jun;5(2-3):236-41. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsp056. Epub 2010 Jan 18.
Converging behavioral and neuroimaging evidence indicates that culture influences the processing of complex visual scenes. Whereas Westerners focus on central objects and tend to ignore context, East Asians process scenes more holistically, attending to the context in which objects are embedded. We investigated cultural differences in contextual processing by manipulating the congruence of visual scenes presented in an fMR-adaptation paradigm. We hypothesized that East Asians would show greater adaptation to incongruent scenes, consistent with their tendency to process contextual relationships more extensively than Westerners. Sixteen Americans and 16 native Chinese were scanned while viewing sets of pictures consisting of a focal object superimposed upon a background scene. In half of the pictures objects were paired with congruent backgrounds, and in the other half objects were paired with incongruent backgrounds. We found that within both the right and left lateral occipital complexes, Chinese participants showed significantly greater adaptation to incongruent scenes than to congruent scenes relative to American participants. These results suggest that Chinese were more sensitive to contextual incongruity than were Americans and that they reacted to incongruent object/background pairings by focusing greater attention on the object.
汇聚的行为和神经影像学证据表明，文化会影响人们对复杂视觉场景的处理方式。与西方人关注中心物体、倾向于忽略背景不同，东亚人会更整体地处理场景，关注物体所处的嵌入背景。我们通过在 fMRI 适应范式中操纵呈现的视觉场景的一致性来研究文化在背景处理方面的差异。我们假设东亚人在处理不一致的场景时会表现出更大的适应，这与他们比西方人更广泛地处理上下文关系的倾向一致。16 名美国人和 16 名母语为汉语的中国人在观看一组由焦点物体叠加在背景场景上的图片时接受了扫描。在一半的图片中，物体与一致的背景配对，而在另一半图片中，物体与不一致的背景配对。我们发现，在右侧和左侧外侧枕叶复合体中，中国参与者对不一致场景的适应程度明显大于美国参与者对一致场景的适应程度。这些结果表明，中国人比美国人对背景不一致更敏感，他们通过更加关注物体来对不一致的物体/背景配对做出反应。
