By IANS
Washington : Brain functions of humans are influenced by the cultures they belong to, a new US study shows.
In the first imaging study of its kind, researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks.
The scientists asked 10 East Asians who had recently arrived in the US and 10 Americans to make quick perceptual judgments while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner – a technology that maps blood flow changes in the brain that correspond to mental operations.
The study participants were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one, reported science portal ScienceDaily.
In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares – an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context.
In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares regardless of absolute size – a relative judgment of interdependent objects.
The two groups showed different patterns of brain activation when performing these tasks.
Americans, when making relative judgments that are typically harder for them, activated brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks.
They showed much less activation of these regions when making the more culturally familiar absolute judgments.
East Asians showed the opposite tendency, engaging the brain’s attention system more for absolute judgments than for relative judgments.
Past research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasises the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasise the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects.
“Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways and it’s the culture that does the training,” lead researcher John Gabrieli said.