Abstract

The current study investigates cultural differences in memory for faces and their associated contexts between East Asian and Western cultures. Thirty-six Caucasian Canadian (age range = 17 - 30, M = 21.00, SD = 3.94) and 35 native Chinese (age range = 19 – 27, M = 22.06, SD = 2.33) young adults participated in the study. At encoding, participants subjectively rated face stimuli according to the cue words within social (“FRIENDLY” vs. “SUCCESS”) and perceptual (“HEIGHT” vs. “WEIGHT”) contexts. At test, participants performed a context recognition task to identify whether the test stimulus was a new face or an old face associated with a specific context cue word. Results did not show any cultural difference in memory. However, both cultures showed better recognition in the social context than in the perceptual context condition. In addition, the other race effect was observed in context memory for Canadian, but not Chinese participants.

Highlights

  • Cultural Differences in Memory for Faces and Associated Perceptual and Social Contexts Lingqian Li, B.Sc. (Hons), Master of Arts, 2014 Psychological Science, Ryerson University

  • Trials with RTs of 0 ms were treated as timeout while trials with RTs below 50 ms were treated as immature key press error

  • This study aimed to investigate three primary research questions: (1) Do cultural differences exist between East Asian and Western young adults in their memory for face stimuli and the associated encoding context cues when the association is established with holistic encoding processes? (2) Are the cultural differences, if any, equivalent across social and perceptual contexts? And (3) does the other race effect influence the two cultures differentially for item and context memory for face stimuli? To address these questions, the present study manipulated the experimental instructions to separately promote perceptual-focused and social-focused encoding contexts for face processing during the encoding phase

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Summary

Introduction

Cultural Differences in Memory for Faces and Associated Perceptual and Social Contexts Lingqian Li, B.Sc. (Hons), Master of Arts, 2014 Psychological Science, Ryerson University. Cultural Differences in Memory for Faces and Associated Perceptual and Social Contexts Lingqian Li, B.Sc. The current study investigates cultural differences in memory for faces and their associated contexts between East Asian and Western cultures. Participants subjectively rated face stimuli according to the cue words within social (“FRIENDLY” vs “SUCCESS”) and perceptual (“HEIGHT” vs “WEIGHT”) contexts. Participants performed a context recognition task to identify whether the test stimulus was a new face or an old face associated with a specific context cue word. Results did not show any cultural difference in memory Both cultures showed better recognition in the social context than in the perceptual context condition. The other race effect was observed in context memory for Canadian, but not Chinese participants

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