Do cultural differences emerge at different levels of representational hierarchy?

Abstract

In prior research, Eastern and Western culture groups differ in memory specificity for objects. However, these studies used concrete object stimuli, which carry semantic information that may be confounded with culture. Additionally, the perceptual properties of the stimuli were not tightly controlled. Therefore, it cannot be precisely determined whether the observed cross-cultural differences are generalizable across different stimulus types and memory task demands. In prior studies, Americans demonstrated higher memory specificity than East Asians, but this may be due to Americans being more attuned to the low-level features that distinguish studied items from similar lures, rather than general memory differences. To determine whether this pattern of cross-cultural memory differences emerges irrespective of stimulus properties, we tested American and East Asian young adults using a recognition memory task employing abstract stimuli for which attention to conjunctions of features was critical for discrimination. Additionally, in order to more precisely determine the influence of stimulus and task on culture differences, participants also completed a concrete objects memory task identical to the one used in prior research. The results of the abstract objects task mirror the pattern seen in prior studies with concrete objects: Americans showed generally higher levels of recognition memory performance than East Asians for studied abstract items, whether discriminating them from similar or entirely new items. Results from the current concrete object task generally replicated this pattern. This suggests cross-cultural memory differences generalize across stimulus types and task demands, rather than reflecting differential sensitivity to low-level features or higher-level conjunctions.

Keywords: Cross-cultural; Memory specificity; Object memory; Recognition memory; Representational-hierarchical account.

Fig. 1

Example stimuli for the abstract memory task. Sets of images used as Old stimuli were generated with three binary features: shape, color, and stripes. Feature values were exclusive to each set of objects, and during a 1-back incidental encoding task, participants learned these associations. During test, participants made Old/New judgments for: previously-seen Old items, Recombinations that contained previously-seen features combined in novel ways, and Novel items with features not seen previously (see main text for creation of Novel stimulus sets). Three-Set Recombinations comprised features from all three studied sets. Two-Set Recombinations comprised features from just two sets so that two of the object’s features had been seen together during encoding, but one feature derived from a different set

Fig. 2

Example studied items and tested lures in the Mnemonic Similarity Task. Studied concrete object images that appear in the incidental encoding task (top) and their tested lure counterparts (bottom) are displayed

Fig. 3

Discriminability in the abstract object memory task. d’ scores for each culture group are plotted separately. Americans demonstrated higher discriminability than East Asians in all conditions, with the effect size (i.e., group difference) being highest for the Target-Foil discrimination. Error bars represent standard error of the mean between subjects

Fig. 4

Proportion correct for each abstract object test item condition. Performance for Americans and East Asians are plotted separately. There was a significant main effect for culture such that, collapsing across conditions, Americans had higher proportion correct than East Asians. Error bars represent standard error of the mean between subjects