Culture and the way we think
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
An interesting article for worldview afficienados: Culture Influences Brain Function
This study suggests that culture affects even ‘visual perceptual tasks’:
Subjects were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one. In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context). In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (a relative judgment of interdependent objects).
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Americans, when making relative judgments that are typically harder for them, activated brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks. They showed much less activation of these regions when making the more culturally familiar absolute judgments. East Asians showed the opposite tendency, engaging the brain’s attention system more for absolute judgments than for relative judgments.
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The researchers went on to show that the effect was greater in those individuals who identified more closely with their culture.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...