Cultural differences in non-social neural processes

Abstract

Chapter 3 presents a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between sociocultural experience and cognition, and for explanation of the differences in cognition and behavior between East Asian and Western cultures. It further reviews cultural neuroscience findings that uncover common and distinct neural underpinnings of cognitive processes in individuals from Western and East Asian cultures. Cross-cultural brain imaging findings have shown evidence for differences in brain activity between East Asian and Western cultures involved in perception, attention, memory, causality judgment, mathematical operation, semantic relationship, and decision making. The cultural neuroscience findings reveal neural bases for cultural preferences of context-independent or context-dependent strategies of cognition in multiple neural systems.