Culture, Age and Eye-Movements

We repeated the same experiment as in the culture and aging adaptation fMRI study. Only this time, we were recording subject eye-movements. We know that there were already cultural differences in old adults in terms of brain activity. Specifically, old East Asian adults did not engage the object processing regions to the same degree as Old Westerners. But how do we really know for sure that this was related to visual processing and not some other form of cognitive operations at work. A way to understand this better was to use eye-tracking. Which is what mainly motivated this study. In parallel, this eye-tracking version of the paradigm allowed to examine three main questions:

1. Cultural experience with age predicts that individuals become more different as they become more developed in their culture (assuming that the cultures are different on some dimensions and levels). However, aging also leads to a phenomena called de-differentiation, which refers to the fact that cognitive processing in older adults becomes less individually distinct due to general decline and increased variability in performance. So it would seem these two forces are in opposition. Thus, one question was whether cultural difference diverge or converge with age.

2. Another question was whether these cultural differences are robust to environmental biases. Cultural biases are such that East Asians are context-oriented and Westerners are object-oriented. These are sweeping statements of course, and should in no way be understood as stereotypical. However, there is evidence that suggests that, for whatever reason, there are visual processing differences that are related to the cultural background of individuals, including this current study. The question though is if we were exposed to visual environments that biased us to attend to objects or backgrounds, how would we behave given our own cultural biases to one component over the other?

3. Finally, the last question is whether these cultural biases in visual processing is just an inconsequential behavior, or if it does indeed have impact on other cognitive processes, perhaps an obviously important process such as memory.

In sum, we found that cultural differences diverge with age, these cultural biases remain despite environmental biases, at least in a passive viewing case, and these biases also impact on memory such that the item we attend to less is subsequently less well remembered.

[CNS Poster 2007.pdf]