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Culture can affect not just language and customs, but also how people experience the world on surprisingly basic levels.
Researchers, with the help of brain scans, have a shocking differences in perception (感知) between Westerners and Asians, what they see when they look at a city street, for example, or even how they perceive a simple line in a square, according to findings published in a leading science journal.
In Western countries, culture makes people think of themselves as highly independent individuals. When looking at scenes, Westerners tend to focus more on central objects than on their surroundings. East Asian cultures, however, emphasize inter-dependence. When Easterners look at a scene, they tend to focus on the surroundings as well as the object.
Using an experiment involving two tasks, Dr. Hedden asked subjects to look at a line simply to estimate its length, a task that played to American's strengths. In another, they estimated the line's length relative to the size of a square, an easier task for the Asians.
The level of brain activity, by tracking blood flow, was then measured by Brain Scanners. The experiment found that although there was no difference in performance, and the tasks were very easy, the levels of activity in the subjects' brain were different. For the Americans, areas linked to attention were more, when they worked on the task they tended to find more difficult — estimating the line's size relative to the square. For the Asians, the attention areas lit up more during the harder task also—estimating the line's length without comparing it to the square. The findings are a reflection of more than ten years of previous experimental research into East-West differences.
In one study, for instance researchers offered people a choice among five pens; four red and one green. Easterners were more likely to choose a red pen while Westerners were more likely to choose the green one.
Culture is not affecting how you see the world, but how you choose to understand and internalize(使内化) it.
But such habits can be changed. Some psychological studies suggest that when an Easterner goes to the West or vice versa, habits of thought and perception also begin to change. Such research gives us clues to how our brain works and is hopeful for us to develop programs to improve our memory, memory techniques and enhance and accelerate our learning skills.
