Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02453, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2018 Sep 4;13(7):709-718. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsy039.
A growing body of evidence suggests culture influences how individuals perceive the world around them. This study investigates whether these cultural differences extend to a simple object viewing task and visual cortex by examining voxel pattern representations with multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA). During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, 20 East Asian and 20 American participants viewed photos of everyday items, equated for familiarity and conceptual agreement across cultures. Whole brain searchlight mapping with non-parametric statistical evaluation tested whether these stimuli evoked multi-voxel patterns that were distinct between cultural groups. We found that participants' cultural identities were successfully predicted from stimuli representations in visual cortex Brodmann areas 18 and 19. This result demonstrates culturally specialized visual cortex during a basic perceptual task ubiquitous to everyday life.
越来越多的证据表明，文化会影响个体对周围世界的感知方式。本研究通过使用多体素模式分析（MVPA）来检查体素模式的表示，以探究这些文化差异是否会延伸到简单的物体观察任务和视觉皮层。在功能磁共振成像扫描期间，20 名东亚参与者和 20 名美国参与者观看了日常物品的照片，这些照片在文化之间具有相同的熟悉度和概念一致性。全脑搜索灯映射与非参数统计评估相结合，测试了这些刺激是否在文化群体之间引起了明显的多体素模式。我们发现，参与者的文化身份可以从视觉皮层布罗德曼区域 18 和 19 的刺激表示中成功预测。这一结果表明，在日常生活中普遍存在的基本感知任务中，视觉皮层存在文化专业化。
