Abstract
The dynamic multicultural view explains culture-specific effects on cognition that cultural knowledge is organized in multiple knowledge systems which are specific to each culture and differentially activated when exposed to related objects or scenes. This view predicts automatic categorizations of environmental information according to the culture-specific knowledge systems. This study investigated whether cultural information could be spontaneously categorized, and the modulation of this process by the belief in the biological origin of race (i.e., racial essentialism) with an event-related brain potential, the visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN). Deviant pictures of Eastern (Western) culture were randomly presented in a stream of standard Western (Eastern) pictures while participants were playing a video game. Participants who endorse racial essentialism (high group) showed vMMNs to the deviants with high relevance to the Eastern or Western culture and the deviant with low Eastern relevance; while participants with low racial essentialism showed vMMN to the deviant with high Eastern relevance only. These results revealed spontaneous cultural categorization with vMMN and the top-down modulation of spontaneous categorization by personal belief. In addition, this is the first demonstration of MMNs to cultural deviance and the potentials in applying MMNs to study psychological essentialism and social categorization.
Highlights
The current study examined spontaneous categorizations of cultural information in the environment by measuring an event-related brain potential (ERP) component called the mismatch negativity (MMN)11,12
VMMNs with a central scalp distribution were elicited in both racial essentialism groups, while the Scientific Reports | (2022) 12:4400 |
For the low racial essentialism group, visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN) was only observed to the Eastern deviant with high cultural relevance (t(19) = − 3.67, p < 0.001, d = − 0.82), but not to the Eastern deviant with high cultural relevance, or the with high Eastern (Western) deviants with high or low cultural relevance (ts[19] = − 1.02 to 1.55, ps = 0.16 to 0.48, ds = 0.018 to − 0.23)
Summary
Culture refers to the ideas and practices that are shared by a group of people and can be transmitted across generations. These cultural priming results were consistent with the situated culture m odel in which the activation of a specific culture depends on its situational relevance Both the dynamic multicultural view and the situated culture model emphasize the importance of recent cultural exposures in activating the culture-specific knowledge systems and predict spontaneous extractions and categorizations of culture-related information in the immediate environment. MMN to deviants in cultural category had not been demonstrated in the literature, MMN can be elicited by deviants violating an expected perceptual c ategory28 As this deviant detection process does not require attentional efforts, MMNs are regarded as the intrinsic biomarker for automatic or spontaneous categorization. The differences of the vMMN latencies and scalp distributions in detecting abstract versus physical changes were related to increases in the complexity of cognitive processing and overall frontal cortex activities, as well as differences in the dynamics of the frontalsensory cortical n etwork
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