Culture in the Blender

While reading worldculturenet, I saw a link from Greg Helden’s blog discussing a Stanford-MIT-University of New York at Stony Brook study that shows differences in how visual information is processed in Americans and East Asians. (The MIT press release can be found here. The reference for those of you with access is Hedden, T., Ketay, S., Aron, A., Markus, H. R., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2008). Cultural Influences on Neural Substrates of Attentional Control. Psychological Science, 19, 12-17.) The abstract follows:

Behavioral research has shown that people
from Western cultural contexts perform better on tasks
emphasizing independent (absolute) dimensions than on
tasks emphasizing interdependent (relative) dimensions,
whereas the reverse is true for people from East Asian
contexts. We assessed functional magnetic resonance imaging
responses during performance of simple visuospatial
tasks in which participants made absolute judgments (ignoring
visual context) or relative judgments (taking visual
context into account). In each group, activation in frontal
and parietal brain regions known to be associated with
attentional control was greater during culturally nonpreferred
judgments than during culturally preferred
judgments. Also, within each group, activation differences
in these regions correlated strongly with scores on questionnaires
measuring individual differences in culturetypical
identity. Thus, the cultural background of an individual
and the degree to which the individual endorses
cultural values moderate activation in brain networks
engaged during even simple visual and attentional tasks.

Although it’s not exactly news that you think about things differently in each culture, it’s interesting that it impacts visual data processing. I wonder how a TCK from across such a culture divide does? Would they do well on both? Would it depend on the language used by the researchers in giving instructions and explanations? Do we literally see differently depending on in which home we are?