Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that culture can operate as a lens, bringing distinct aspects of one’s environment into focus based on cultural priorities, values and experiences. Individuals from Western cultures tend to focus on that which is object-based, categorically related or self-relevant whereas people from Eastern cultures tend to focus more on contextual details, similarities and group-relevant information. For example, when asked to describe animated vignettes of underwater scenes, American descriptions focus on the prominent fish in the scene, Japanese participants, on the other hand, incorporate many more contextual details, such as the colour of the seaweed and water and the relationship of the fish to the other elements in the scene.1 These different ways of perceiving the world suggest that culture shapes the ways in which individuals attend to and remember aspects of complex environments.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Richard E. Nisbett, Kaiping Peng, Incheol Choi and Ara Norenzayan (2001), ‘Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Versus Analytic Cognition’, Psychological Review, 108 (2), 291–310.
Harry C. Triandis and Eunkook M. Suh (2002), ‘Cultural Influences on Personality’, Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 133–60.
Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (1991), ‘Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation’, Psychological Review, 98, 224–53.
Richard E. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda (2003), ‘Culture and Point of View’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100 (19), 11163–70; Nisbett et al. (2001).
Michael W. Morris and Kaiping Peng (1994), ‘Culture and Cause–American and Chinese Attributions for Social and Physical Events’, Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 67 (6), 949–71.
See Masuda and Nisbett (2001), ‘Attending Holistically Versus Analytically: Comparing the Context Sensitivity of Japanese and Americans’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (5), 922–34.
Daniel L. Schacter, Angela H. Gutchess and Elizabeth A. Kensinger (2009), ‘Specificity of Memory: Implications for Individual and Collective Remembering’, in Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (eds), Memory in Mind and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 83–111, here p. 83.
Angela H. Gutchess, Robert C. Welsh, Aysecan Boduroglu and Denise C. Park (2006), ‘Cultural Differences in Neural Function Associated with Object Processing’, Cognitive Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 6 (2), 102–9.
Joshua O.S. Goh, Soon Chung Siong, Denise C. Park et al. (2004), ‘Cortical Areas Involved in Object, Background, and Object-Background Processing Revealed with Functional Magnetic Resonance Adaptation’, Journal of Neuroscience, 24 (45), 10223–8.
See Trey Hedden, Sarah Ketay, Arthur Aron, Hazel Rose Markus and John D.E. Gabrieli (2008), ‘Cultural Influences on Neural Substrates of Attentional Control’, Psychological Science, 19 (1), 12–17.
W. Bousfield (1953), ‘The Occurrence of Clustering in the Recall of Randomly Arranged Associates’, Journal of General Psychology, 49, 229–40.
See Carolyn Yoon, Fred Feinberg, Ping Hu et al. (2004), ‘Category Norms as a Function of Culture and Age: Comparisons of Item Responses to 105 Categories by American and Chinese Adults’, Psychology and Aging, 19 (3), 379–93.
Angela H. Gutchess, Carolyn Yoon, Ting Luo et al. (2006), ‘Categorical Organization in Free Recall Across Culture and Age’, Gerontology, 52 (5), 314–23.
Qi Wang (2006), ‘Culture and the Development of Self-Knowledge’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15 (4), 182–7.
Ilan Harpaz-Rotem and William Hirst (2005), ‘The Earliest Memory in Individuals Raised in Either Traditional and Reformed Kibbutz or Outside the Kibbutz’, Memory, 13 (1), 51–62.
Ying Zhu, Li Zhang, Jin Fan and Shihui Han (2007), ‘Neural Basis of Cultural Influence on Self-Representation’, Neuroimage, 34 (3), 1310–16..
Roberto Cabeza and Peggy L. St Jacques (2007), ‘Functional Neuroimaging of Autobiographical Memory’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (5), 219–27.
Lera Boroditsky (2001), ‘Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time’, Cognitive Psychology, 43 (1), 1–22; Li -Jun Ji, Ziyong Zhang and Richard E. Nisbett (2004).
Kevin J. Blot, Michael A. Zarate and Paul B. Paulus (2003), ‘Code-Switching Across Brainstorming Sessions: Implications for the Revised Hierarchical Model of Bilingual Language Processing’, Experimental Psychology, 50 (3), 171–83.
Ellen Bialystok, Catherine McBride-Chang and Gigi Luk (2005), ‘Bilingualism, Language Proficiency, and Learning to Read in Two Writing Systems’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 97 (4), 580–90.
Margarita Kaushanskaya and Viorica Marian (2009), ‘Bilingualism Reduces Native-Language Interference During Novel-Word Learning’, Journal ofExperimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition, 35 (3), 829–35.
Linda D. Gerard and Don L. Scarborough (1989), ‘Language-Specific Lexical Access of Homographs by Bilinguals’, Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition, 15 (2), 305–15.
Ellen Bialystok, Fergus Craik and Gigi Luk (2008), ‘Cognitive Control and Lexical Access in Younger and Older Bilinguals’, Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition, 34 (4), 859–73.
Ellen Bialystok, Fergus Craik and Jennifer Ryan (2006), ‘Executive Control in a Modified Antisaccade Task: Effects of Aging and Bilingualism’, Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition, 32 (6), 1341–54.
Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch (1974), ‘Working Memory’, Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 8, 47–89.
Tamar Gollan and Victor S. Ferreira (2009), ‘Should I Stay or Should I Switch? A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Voluntary Language Switching in Young and Aging Bilinguals’, Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition, 35 (3), 640–65.
Michael C. Anderson and Barbara A. Spellman (1995), ‘On the Status of Inhibitory Mechanisms in Cognition–Memory Retrieval as a Model Case’, Psychological Review, 102 (1), 68–100.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gutchess, A.H., Siegel, M. (2012). Memory Specificity Across Cultures. In: Assmann, A., Shortt, L. (eds) Memory and Political Change. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354241_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354241_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-30200-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-35424-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)