Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2012 Sep;113(1):20-35. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.04.009. Epub 2012 Jun 5.
Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool children in the two cultures. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds from the two cultures (N=64) participated in a relational match-to-standard task in two conditions, with simple or richly detailed objects, in which a focus on individual objects may hurt performance. Rich objects, consistent with past research, strongly limited the performance of U.S. children but not Japanese children. In Experiment 2, U.S. and Japanese 4-year-olds (N=72) participated in a visual search task that required them to find a specific object in a cluttered, but organized as a scene, visual field in which object-centric attention might be expected to aid performance and relational attentional pattern may hinder the performance because of relational structure that was poised by the scene. U.S. children outperformed Japanese children. In Experiment 3, 4-year-olds from both cultures (N=36) participated in a visual search task that was similar to Experiment 2 but with randomly placed objects, where there should not be a difference between the performance of two cultures because the relational structure that may be posed by the scene is eliminated. This double-dissociation is discussed in terms of implications for different developmental trajectories, with different developmental subtasks in the two cultures.
越来越多的证据表明，东方和西方文化的成年人在注意力和认知处理方面存在一系列普遍差异。东方成年人的认知通常更具关系性，而西方成年人的认知则更注重对象。三项实验检验了这些差异是否描述了两种文化中学龄前儿童的认知。在实验 1 中，来自两个文化的 4 岁儿童（N=64）在两种条件下参加了关系匹配标准任务，条件为简单或详细的物体，其中对单个物体的关注可能会影响表现。与过去的研究一致，丰富的物体强烈限制了美国儿童的表现，但没有限制日本儿童的表现。在实验 2 中，美国和日本的 4 岁儿童（N=72）参加了一个视觉搜索任务，要求他们在一个杂乱但组织成场景的视觉场中找到一个特定的物体，在这种情况下，以物体为中心的注意力可能有助于表现，而关系注意力模式可能会因为场景所呈现的关系结构而阻碍表现。美国儿童的表现优于日本儿童。在实验 3 中，来自两个文化的 4 岁儿童（N=36）参加了与实验 2 相似的视觉搜索任务，但物体是随机放置的，两种文化的表现不应有差异，因为场景可能呈现的关系结构被消除了。这种双重分离是根据两种文化不同的发展轨迹和不同的发展子任务来讨论的。
