Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2010 Jun;5(2-3):148-58. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsp058. Epub 2010 Jan 18.
The investigation of cultural phenomena using neuroscientific methods-cultural neuroscience (CN)-is receiving increasing attention. Yet it is unclear whether the integration of cultural study and neuroscience is merely additive, providing additional evidence of neural plasticity in the human brain, or truly synergistic, yielding discoveries that neither discipline could have achieved alone. We discuss how the parent fields to CN: cross-cultural psychology, psychological anthropology and cognitive neuroscience inform the investigation of the role of cultural experience in shaping the brain. Drawing on well-established methodologies from cross-cultural psychology and cognitive neuroscience, we outline a set of guidelines for CN, evaluate 17 CN studies in terms of these guidelines, and provide a summary table of our results. We conclude that the combination of culture and neuroscience is both additive and synergistic; while some CN methodologies and findings will represent the direct union of information from parent fields, CN studies employing the methodological rigor required by this logistically challenging new field have the potential to transform existing methodologies and produce unique findings.
使用神经科学方法研究文化现象——文化神经科学（CN）——正受到越来越多的关注。然而，目前尚不清楚文化研究与神经科学的融合是仅仅是累加的，为人类大脑的神经可塑性提供了更多的证据，还是真正的协同作用，产生了任何一个学科都无法单独取得的发现。我们讨论了 CN 的母体领域：跨文化心理学、心理人类学和认知神经科学如何为研究文化经验在塑造大脑中的作用提供信息。借鉴跨文化心理学和认知神经科学中成熟的方法，我们为 CN 制定了一套指导方针，根据这些方针评估了 17 项 CN 研究，并提供了我们研究结果的总结表。我们的结论是，文化与神经科学的结合既是累加的，也是协同的；虽然一些 CN 方法和发现将代表来自母体领域信息的直接结合，但采用这个具有挑战性的新领域所需的严格方法学的 CN 研究有可能改变现有的方法，并产生独特的发现。
