Department of Psychology, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Center on Aging Psychology, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2018 Nov 20;13(11):e0207515. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207515. eCollection 2018.
It has been shown in literature that East Asians are more inclined to process context information than individuals in Western cultures. Using a context memory task that requires studying object images in social contexts (i.e., rating objects in an imagined social or experiential scenario), our recent study revealed an age-invariant advantage for Chinese young and older participants compared to their Canadian counterparts in memory for encoding contexts. To examine whether this cultural difference also occurred during encoding, this follow-up report analyzed encoding performance and its relationship to subsequent memory based on the same data from the same task of the same sample. The results revealed that at encoding, Chinese participants provided higher ratings of objects, took longer to rate, and reported more vivid imagery of encoding contexts relative to their Canadian counterparts. Furthermore, only Chinese participants rated objects with recognized context at retrieval higher and slower relative to those with misrecognized context. For Chinese participants, primarily older adults, slower ratings were only related to better context memory but not item memory. Importantly, Chinese participants' context memory advantage disappeared after controlling for encoding differences. Taken together, these results suggest that Chinese participants' memory advantage for social contexts may have its origin in the construction of elaborative and meaningful object-context associations at encoding.
文献表明，东亚人比西方文化中的个体更倾向于处理语境信息。在一项需要在社会语境中研究物体图像的语境记忆任务中（即在想象的社会或体验场景中对物体进行评分），我们最近的研究表明，与加拿大同龄人相比，中国的年轻和年长参与者在记忆编码语境方面具有年龄不变的优势。为了检验这种文化差异是否也发生在编码过程中，本后续报告根据同一任务的相同数据和同一样本分析了编码表现及其与后续记忆的关系。结果表明，在编码过程中，与加拿大参与者相比，中国参与者对物体的评分更高，评分时间更长，对编码语境的想象更生动。此外，只有中国参与者在检索时对识别出的语境中的物体的评分更高、更慢，而对错误识别的语境中的物体的评分则更慢。对于中国参与者，主要是老年人，较慢的评分仅与更好的语境记忆相关，而与项目记忆无关。重要的是，在中国参与者的编码差异得到控制后，他们的语境记忆优势消失了。总之，这些结果表明，中国参与者在社会语境方面的记忆优势可能源于在编码过程中构建详尽而有意义的物体-语境关联。
