State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 7;8(8):e71625. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071625. Print 2013.
It is well documented that East Asians differ from Westerners in conscious perception and attention. However, few studies have explored cultural differences in unconscious processes such as implicit learning.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The global-local Navon letters were adopted in the serial reaction time (SRT) task, during which Chinese and British participants were instructed to respond to global or local letters, to investigate whether culture influences what people acquire in implicit sequence learning. Our results showed that from the beginning British expressed a greater local bias in perception than Chinese, confirming a cultural difference in perception. Further, over extended exposure, the Chinese learned the target regularity better than the British when the targets were global, indicating a global advantage for Chinese in implicit learning. Moreover, Chinese participants acquired greater unconscious knowledge of an irrelevant regularity than British participants, indicating that the Chinese were more sensitive to contextual regularities than the British.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The results suggest that cultural biases can profoundly influence both what people consciously perceive and unconsciously learn.
有大量文献证明东亚人与西方人在意识感知和注意力方面存在差异。然而，很少有研究探索无意识过程中的文化差异，如内隐学习。
方法/主要发现：本研究采用全局-局部纳冯字母任务，在序列反应时间（SRT）任务中，中国和英国参与者被指示对全局或局部字母做出反应，以调查文化是否影响人们在内隐序列学习中获得的内容。结果表明，从一开始，英国人在感知上的局部偏见就大于中国人，这证实了感知方面的文化差异。此外，在长时间的暴露后，当目标为全局时，中国人比英国人更好地学习了目标规则，这表明中国人在内隐学习方面具有全局优势。此外，中国参与者获得了比英国参与者更多的无关规则的无意识知识，这表明中国人比英国人更敏感于上下文规则。
结论/意义：结果表明，文化偏见可以深刻地影响人们有意识地感知和无意识地学习的内容。
