Leger Krystal R, Gutchess Angela
Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham MA.
Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham MA.
J Appl Res Mem Cogn. 2021 Mar;10(1):33-43. doi: 10.1016/j.jarmac.2020.08.016. Epub 2020 Nov 24.
Previous research has revealed that people from Western cultures tend to remember more details of objects and events in autobiographical memory compared to people from Eastern cultures. The present experiments tested whether differences in pattern separation - the process by which new, but potentially similar, exemplars are discriminated from previously-encountered exemplars - account for these cultural difference in object memory. In two experiments, we investigated the extent to which North Americans and East Asians differ in pattern separation and whether these effects are related to cultural values. We also examined the role of response bias. These results revealed it is unlikely that pattern separation is the sole mechanism underlying cross-cultural memory specificity differences, as broader memory mechanisms, such as differences in memory resolution for previously-encoded items, could account for the differences observed between groups.
先前的研究表明，与来自东方文化的人相比，来自西方文化的人往往能在自传体记忆中记住更多关于物体和事件的细节。目前的实验测试了模式分离（即从先前遇到的范例中区分出新的但可能相似的范例的过程）的差异是否能够解释这些物体记忆中的文化差异。在两项实验中，我们研究了北美人和东亚人在模式分离方面的差异程度，以及这些影响是否与文化价值观有关。我们还研究了反应偏差的作用。这些结果表明，模式分离不太可能是跨文化记忆特异性差异的唯一潜在机制，因为更广泛的记忆机制，如先前编码项目的记忆分辨率差异，可能解释了不同群体之间观察到的差异。
