Cross-cultural differences in memory specificity

Abstract

Attention and memory have been shown to differ across cultures, with independent Western cultures preferring an object-based feature analysis and interdependent Eastern cultures preferring a context-based holistic analysis. In two experiments, we assessed whether these cultural differences not only affect how much information is remembered, but also the specificity of memory such that the feature analysis preference of Americans should lead to greater memory for visual detail. Americans and East Asians incidentally encoded pictures of single items (Exp 1) and pictures of focal items presented against a meaningful background (Exp 2). On a recognition test, participants made same, similar, or new decisions about items (Exp 1 & 2) and backgrounds (Exp 2) that were the same as or similar to the encoded stimuli, as well as novel lures. As predicted, Americans exhibited greater accuracy than East Asians in specific memory for objects presented alone and this trend continued across both objects and backgrounds when objects were depicted in context. The two cultural groups did not differ in general (item-level) memory. These results support the idea that the feature analysis biases of Westerners may increase the specificity of visual information contained in memory, despite equivalent item-level memory.