Understanding Cognitive Differences Across Cultures Integrating Neuroscience And Cultural Psychology

While the main source of knowledge of human cognition has come from studies of information processing in a single culture, primarily within the U.S. or within certain countries in Europe, much research has also been conducted in other parts of the world. Can the study of cognition across cultures lead us to interesting conclusions about human cognition in general? Surely any general theory of language processing, for example, must be able to explain phenomena observed across cultures and not just within a single one. This book is an attempt to look at this issue of universals in thinking and understanding by providing a compendium of cross cultural investigations in the four major areas of cognitive psychology: (1) memory and knowledge representation, (2) language processing, (3) perception, and (4) reasoning and problem solving. The differences found across cultures are also fascinating and extremely informative. A final chapter provides a summary of the major findings reported in each of these areas. The chapters included in this work were written for those interested in cross-cultural psychology and also those with an interest in cultural anthropology. The authors are well-known in the areas of cross-cultural psychology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. However, the reader need not be an expert in any one of these fields to understand the conclusions and implications of the work reported here.

This breakthrough volume brings together cultural neuroscience and intercultural relations in an expansive presentation. Its selected topics in reasoning, memory, and other key cognitive areas bridge the neuroscience behind culture-related phenomena with the complex social processes involved in seeing the world through the perspective of others. Coverage ranges beyond the familiar paradigms of acculturation and cultural differences to propose new ideas of potential benefit to the new generation of immigrants, negotiators, executives, and other travelers. Taken together, these chapters offer a deeper understanding of issues that can only become more important as the world becomes smaller and our global family larger. Among the topics featured: Intergroup relationship and empathy for others' pain: a social neuroscience approach. The neuroscience of bilingualism: cross-linguistic influences and cognitive effects. Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes and its consequences for international relations. Implications of behavioral and neuroscience research for cross-cultural training. Intercultural relations and the perceptual brain: a cognitive neuroscience perspective. How social dynamics shape our understanding of reality. With its elegant perspectives and empirical depth, Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts is a forward-looking reference for researchers in the cultural sciences (cross-cultural psychologists, anthropologists, etc.) and in social, affective, and cognitive neuroscience.

This volume compares and contrasts contemporary theories of cognition, modes of perception, and learning from cross-cultural perspectives. The participants were asked to consider and assess the question of whether people from different cultures think differently. Moreover, they were asked to consider whether the same approaches to teaching and development of thinking will work in all cultures as well as they do in Western, literate societies.

This volume presents recent empirical advances using neuroscience techniques to investigate how culture influences neural processes underlying a wide range of human abilities, from perception and scene processing to memory and social cognition. It also highlights the theoretical and methodological issues with conducting cultural neuroscience research. Section I provides diverse theoretical perspectives on how culture and biology interact are represented. Sections II –VI is to demonstrate how cultural values, beliefs, practices and experience affect neural systems underlying a wide range of human behavior from perception and cognition to emotion, social cognition and decision-making. The final section presents arguments for integrating the study of culture and the human brain by providing an explicit articulation of how the study of culture can inform the study of the brain and vice versa.

Cultural neuroscience combines brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related brain potentials with methods of social and cultural psychology to investigate whether and how cultures influence the neural mechanisms of perception, attention, emotion, social cognition, and other human cognitive processes. The findings of cultural neuroscience studies improve our understanding of the relation between human brain function and sociocultural contexts and help to reframe the “big question” of nature versus nurture. This book is organized so that two chapters provide general views of the relation between biological evolution, cultural evolution and recent cultural neuroscience studies, while other chapters focus on several aspects of human cognition that have been shown to be strongly influenced by sociocultural factors such as self-concept representation, language processes, emotion, time perception, and decision-making. The main goal of this work is to address how thinking actually takes place and how the underlying neural mechanisms are affected by culture and identity.

This book addresses a central question: how did cognition emerge in human history? It approaches the question from a cultural-historical, neuropsychological perspective and analyses evidence on the historical origins of cognitive activity; integrates information regarding cross-cultural differences in neuropsychological performance; and discusses how adopting a historical and cultural perspective in the behavioural neurosciences can help to arrive at a better understanding of cognition. Lastly, it proposes general guidelines for future research in the area.