©Arlene R. Taylor PhD
Cultural neuroscience is a relatively new area of research that investigates cultural variation in psychological, neural, and genomic processes as a means of articulating the interrelationship of these processes and their emergent properties. A growing number of studies show that both the structure and the function of the developing human brain are shaped both by the environment and by cultural experiences.
It can be described as the study of how culture (e.g., values, practices and beliefs) shapes the brain and, in turn, how culture is shaped by the mind, brain, and genes across multiple timescales. Much like the science of Brain Function, Cultural Neuroscience attempts to bridge theory and methods from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and genetics.
The idea that complex behavior results from the dynamic interaction of genes and cultural environment is not new. Cultural Neuroscience, however, represents a novel empirical approach to demonstrating bi-directional interactions between culture and biology by integrating theory and methods from cultural psychology, neuroscience, and neurogenetics. Researchers in Cultural Neuroscience are attempting to explore and find answers to questions such as:
Emerging answers are pointing to brain differences based on culture; uncovering neurobiological bases for well-known, as well as for unexpected, cultural differences in the way in which brains are shaped and how they function.
As Chiao and Ambady pointed out in Chapter 9 of the book entitled Cultural Neuroscience – Parsing Universality and Diversity Across Levels of Analysis:
The goals and research questions of cultural neuroscience are to a certain extent similar to those driving the modern neuroscientific study of race. In recent years, the importance of social experience on brain function has been highlighted by studies showing that racial group membership affects neural processes underlying other basic aspects of social cognition, such as face perception and recognition, as well as social evaluation and bias. Cultural neuroscience, however, is likely to illuminate how sociocultural and biological factors influence each other in ways not previously revealed by neuroscientific studies of race.
Culture and race differ in a number of important respects. Culture refers to shared meaning systems, social practices, geographical space, social and religious values, language, ways of relating, diet, and ecology. In contrast, the concept of race, which typically refers to physical characteristics such as skin color, facial features, and hair type shared by people of a given ancestral origin, is shrouded in controversy about whether race refers solely to biological or socially constructed features that differentiate groups of people. Individuals may belong to different races but may share the same culture. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians living in America, for example.
The ability for a cultural neuroscience frame to provide novel links between sociocultural and biological phenomenon is unprecedented. The development of paradigms and tools in the three fields of cultural psychology, social-cognitive-affective neuroscience, and imaging genomics make this endeavor possible in ways never previously imagined. We do not expect that the study of all psychological and biological phenomena will necessitate a cultural neuroscience approach. Rather, the goal and challenge for cultural neuroscience is to identify the phenomena that can be readily mapped within and across levels. It is these phenomena that hold the promise to provide a window into our understanding of the interplay of sociocultural and biological processes.
There are at least two foreseeable benefits of a cultural neuroscience approach for basic and applied research:
Emerging research results are sure to trigger discussions about the plasticity of the human brain and about the age-old “chicken-or-the-egg” controversy. All else aside, the results are sure to be interesting and to provide much food for thought!
Joan Y. Chiao, a former graduate student of Ambady at Harvard and now a professor of psychology at Northwestern University reportedly coined the term cultural neuroscience. (Blanding, Michael. The Brain in the World – A Burgeoning Science Explores the Deep Imprint of Culture. Source.)
An article by Sharon Begley entitled West Brain, East Brain, was published in Newsweek in early 2010. Begley commented on the new field of Cultural Neuroscience and quoted studies by several researchers including Psychologist Nalini Ambady of Tufts University. For example, a 2006 study of native Chinese speakers use brain circuits that process visual and spatial information and plan movements when doing simple arithmetic or deciding which number is larger. English speakers, on the other hand, use brain circuits involved with language:
According to Ambady, “One would think that neural processes involving basic mathematical computations are universal, but they seem to be culture-specific.” Could this brain processing or perception difference account for some of the math genius sometimes seen in the Asian population?
NOTE: Most current transcultural neuroimaging studies have compared people from Western and East Asian cultures. People from North American and European countries are considered to be Western; people from Japan, Korea, or China are considered to be East Asian.
In 2008, Shihui Han and Georg Northoff wrote an article that was published in Nature/Reviews (August, Volume 9). Entitled Culture-Sensitive Neural Substrates of Human Cognition: A Transcultural Neuroimaging Approach, their work is proving to be foundational for Cultural Neuroscience, a term used near the end of the article. 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.
Here are examples of study findings:
1. Cultural diversity 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’ approach demonstrates that different socio-cultural systems give rise to dissimilar thought styles. Westerners generally think in an analytical way, whereas East Asians generally think in a more holistic manner.
2. Recall of social events
Individuals of Chinese extraction 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 events.
3. Social cognition in playing games
In a game that involved two individuals interacting, Chinese participants were more in tune with their partner’s perspective than were American players.
4. Recalling trait words
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 them. Chinese participants remembered both equally well.
5. Explanation of behaviors
East Asians showed a preference for attributing behavior to situational factors (e.g., environmental events). Americans tended to explain behaviors in terms of peoples’ dispositions (e.g., a person’s gender and education),
6. Classification of objects
Chinese people organized objects in a more relational manner (e.g., group a monkey and a banana together because monkeys eat bananas). European Americans tended to organize objects in a more categorical style (e.g., group a monkey and a panda together because both are animals).
7. Perceptual processing
Westerners seem inclined to pay more attention to salient objects than to contextual background, whereas East Asians seem to attend more to relations and contexts than to salient objects. For example:
The authors concluded that findings such as these provide evidence for the diversity of multiple-level cognitive processes across cultures and the dependence of human cognition on sociocultural contexts.
NOTE: Shihui Han is at the Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Beijing, China. Georg Northoff is at the Laboratory for Functional Imaging and Neurophilosophy, Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, Ottovon-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Leipziger Strasse 44, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany.
