Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.
By comparing cognitive functions in people from Western (European and American) and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, et cetera) cultures, the ‘culture-and-cognition’ approach104 demonstrates that different sociocultural systems give rise to dissimilar thought styles. Westerners generally think in an analytical way, whereas East Asians generally think in a more holistic manner5, 7. For instance, during a perception task, Americans were better at detecting changes in salient objects than East Asians, and were less affected by contextual information24, 26, 27.
Cultural differences are also evident in social cognition. In a game that involved two individuals interacting, Chinese participants were more in tune with their partner’s perspective than Americans105. Furthermore, Chinese people were more likely to describe memories of social and historical events and focused more on social interactions, whereas European Americans more frequently focused on memories of personal experiences and emphasized their personal roles in events106. Westerners were better at remembering trait words that they associated with themselves than they were at remembering words that they associated with people close to them84, 107, whereas Chinese people remembered both equally well108. Americans tended to explain behaviours in terms of peoples’ dispositions (for example, a person’s gender and education), whereas East Asians showed a preference for attributing behaviour to situational factors (for example, environmental events)9, 109 and were more likely to use situational information to predict other people’s behaviour110. Chinese people endorsed contextual explanations of physical events (for example, friction influencing the movement of an object) more often than Americans, who were more likely to attribute physical events to dispositional factors (for example, an object’s weight or composition)111.
Culture also influences category-based classification of objects: Chinese people organized objects in a more relational (for example, to group a monkey and a banana together because monkeys eat bananas) and less categorical (for example, to group a monkey and a panda together because both are animals) way than European Americans7, 112. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the diversity of multiple-level cognitive processes across cultures and the dependence of human cognition on sociocultural contexts.