DOES AGING ACT TO MAXIMIZE OR MINIMIZE CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE PROCESSING STYLE? EVIDENCE FROM EYE MOVEMENTS DURING SCENE PERCEPTION

Transcription

1 DOES AGING ACT TO MAXIMIZE OR MINIMIZE CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE PROCESSING STYLE? EVIDENCE FROM EYE MOVEMENTS DURING SCENE PERCEPTION by Zihui Lu A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Department of Psychology University of Toronto Copyright by Zihui Lu (2008)

2 Does aging act to maximize or minimize cultural differences in cognitive processing style? Evidence from eye movements during scene perception Master of Arts (2008) Zihui Lu Department of Psychology University of Toronto ABSTRACT There is evidence to suggest that people from different cultures have different cognitive processing styles. For example, by measuring the eye movements of American and Chinese students when viewing pictures, Chua, Boland, and Nisbett (2005) found that American students fixated more on the focal object, whereas Chinese students fixated more on the background. In a subsequent object-recognition task, the Chinese students were less likely to correctly recognize old objects presented in new backgrounds than Americans did. This study used a similar scene-viewing task to investigate whether aging modulates these cultural differences in cognitive processing style. Like Chua et al., we found that young Chinese students spent longer fixating the background than did their Western counterparts. However, we failed to replicate the accompanying memory bias observed by Chua et al. Our strongest finding was that maintaining the original background facilitated memory for objects in young participants of both cultures but not for older participants. This result suggests that older adults had poorer memory for background details and/or had poorer integration of object and background. ii

3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank Meredyth Daneman and Eyal Reingold for their continuous support and valuable advice throughout my work on this project. I would also like to thank Jiye Shen and Zhaowu Luo for their technical support for the Eyelink system. iii

4 Table of Contents List of Figures iv List of Appendices.iv Introduction...1 Background: Cultural Differences.1 Background: Aging 5 Method...7 Participants.7 Study Phase 8 Object-recognition Phase...11 Data Analysis.12 Results and Discussion..13 Eye Movement Data..13 Object-recognition Data.16 Summary and Conclusions 20 References..23 Appendix A...25 Appendix B...31 Appendix C 43 iv

5 List of Figures Figure 1. Sample pictures presented in Chua et al. (2005) study. Figure 2. Sample pictures from the Study Phase and the Object-Recognition Phase. Figure 3. Sample protocol of a participant viewing the picture illustrated in Figure 2(b). Figure 4. Eye-movement data as a function of cultural heritage and age. Figure 5. Proportion of fixations to objects or backgrounds, across the 3-s time course of a trial. Figure 6. Hits minus false alarms on the object-recognition task. v

6 List of Appendices Appendix A. Appendix B. Appendix C. The 36 Pictures from the Study Phase. The 72 Pictures from the Object-Recognition Phase. Characteristics of Stimuli in Object-Recognition Task. vi

7 Cognitive Processing Style 1 Does Aging Act to Maximize or Minimize Cultural Differences in Cognitive Processing Style? Evidence from Eye Movements during Scene Perception There is evidence to suggest that Westerners and East Asians differ markedly in their cognitive processing styles. For example, Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. By tracking the eye movements of American and Chinese students when viewing pictures of naturalistic scenes, Chua, Boland, and Nisbett (2005) found that the American students fixated more on the focal object in the scene, whereas the Chinese students fixated more on the background. In a subsequent object-recognition task, the Chinese students were less likely to correctly recognize old objects presented in new scene backgrounds, suggesting that they tended to bind the object with the background. Chua et al. interpreted these findings as evidence that Westerners tend to engage in a processing style that is analytic and object-centered, whereas East Asians tend to engage in a processing style that is holistic and more attentive to context and relationships (see also, Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). The present study had two goals. The first goal was to attempt a replication of the Chua et al. (2005) eye movement and recognition memory findings with a group of young adult students of European-Canadian and Chinese descent. The second goal was to investigate whether aging serves to modulate the cultural differences in cognitive processing style that have been observed in young adults. BACKGROUND: CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

8 Cognitive Processing Style 2 Cultural differences in cognitive processing styles have emerged on tasks measuring memory and perceptual judgments (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003; Masuda, & Nisbett, 2001), Stroop interference (Ishii, Reyes, & Kitayama, 2003), and self-descriptions (Kanagawa, Cross, & Markus, 2001). For example, Kitayama et al. (2003) used a framed-line perceptual judgment task to investigate the hypothesis that Westerners are more capable of ignoring contextual information whereas East Asians are more capable of incorporating contextual information. On each trial, American and Japanese students were presented with a square frame with a vertical line printed inside it. They were then shown another square frame of the same or different size and were asked to draw a line that was identical to the first line either in absolute length (absolute task) or in proportion to the height of the surrounding frame (relative task). The absolute judgment tasks requires the participant to attend to the focal object (the line) while ignoring the contextual information (the frame); in contrast, the relative judgment task requires participants to make a focal judgment that is sensitive to the relevant context. The results showed that the American participants were more accurate at the absolute task, whereas the Japanese participants were more accurate at the relative task. Kitayama et al. interpreted these findings as consistent with the view that North Americans are more capable of ignoring contextual information, whereas Japanese are more likely to incorporate it (see also Ji et al., 2000, who used a Rod and Frame perceptual judgment task to investigate culture-based biases). Masuda and Nisbett (2001) investigated the way in which Westerners and East Asians attend to complex visual displays. They had American and Japanese students view animated vignettes of underwater scenes and report the contents of each vignette

9 Cognitive Processing Style 3 immediately after viewing it. Then at the end of the experiment, participants were asked to make old/new recognition memory judgments for animals in a new series of pictures, some of which showed an original focal object against its original background, and others of which showed the original focal object against a new background. The immediate recall task showed that Americans and Japanese were equally likely to mention the focal objects (large, brightly colored, rapidly moving objects) in their reports. However, Japanese students reported more information about the background (e.g., rocks, small nonmoving objects, color of water) and the relationships between the focal objects and the background than did the American students. Moreover, Japanese students recognized previously seen objects more accurately when they saw them with their original backgrounds intact than when they saw them with novel backgrounds, whereas this manipulation had no effect on Americans. Masuda and Nisbett (2001) interpreted their findings as evidence for the fact that East Asians are more attentive to context and relationships than are Westerners (p. 932). Although Masuda and Nisbett (2001) attributed their memory findings to cultural differences in attention to context, it is quite possible that their immediate recall and delayed recognition findings were due to differences in retrieval processes or response bias rather than differences in the initial allocation of attentional resources to the perceptual task. To gain more direct evidence concerning attentional strategies during perception and encoding, Chua et al. (2005) monitored the eye movements of American and Chinese students while they engaged in a similar scene viewing task. During the eye tracking phase, participants viewed a series of 36 pictures on a computer monitor. Each picture contained a focal object (e.g., a cow) against a complex, naturalistic background

10 Cognitive Processing Style 4 (e.g., meadow with trees and a snow-capped mountain); see Figure 1(a) for a sample picture. Participants were given 3 s to freely look at the picture, and once it was removed, they were asked to verbally say a number between 1 and 7 to indicate the degree to which they liked the picture. For the yes/no object recognition task, they were presented with 72 pictures in one of four conditions: old object on old background (see Figure 1a for an example); old object on new background (see Figure 1b); new object on old background; and new object on new background. Their task was to judge whether or not they had seen the objects in the original scene-viewing phase. (a) (b) Fig. 1. Sample pictures presented in Chua et al. (2005) study. Panel (a) depicts the object on the original background, and panel (b) depicts the original object on a new background. The recognition memory results were consistent with those of Masuda and Nisbett (2001) in that American participants object recognition performance appeared unaffected by the manipulation of the background context whereas Chinese participants recognized previously seen objects more accurately when they saw them with their original backgrounds intact than when they saw them with novel backgrounds. Like Masuda and Nisbett, Chua et al. (2005) took the memory findings as evidence that East

11 Cognitive Processing Style 5 Asians tend to bind object with background. The eye movement findings were consistent with the view that East Asians and Westerners differ in their relative attentiveness to focal object versus context. American participants fixated on the focal object sooner and longer than did their Chinese counterparts, whereas Chinese participants spent longer fixating the background than did the Americans. Chua et al. took these findings as evidence that cultural differences in judgment and memory can be attributed to differences in what is actually attended to as people view scenes. The present study attempted a replication of the Chua et al. study on a group of young adult students of European-Canadian and Chinese heritage. BACKGROUND: AGING A second goal of the present study was to examine whether aging has any effect on the cultural differences in scene-scanning biases and object-recognition memory that Chua et al. (2005) observed in young Western and East Asian adults. To this end, our design included a group of older adults of European-Canadian and Chinese descent. Logically speaking, we might be tempted to predict that aging would serve to magnify culture s effect on cognitive processing styles; after all, the older the individual, the longer he or she would have been exposed to the culture, and the greater the likelihood that cultural biases in processing style would have become entrenched. Although we are not aware of any behavioral data to support this position, Park and Gutchess (2006) reported preliminary neuroimaging data that are consistent with it. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) during a scene-viewing task, Park and colleagues found that young East Asians showed less activation in object-processing

12 Cognitive Processing Style 6 areas of the cortex than did young Americans, and this difference increased with age (see also Gutchess, Welsh, Boduroglu, & Park, 2006). Although the prediction that aging would serve to magnify cultural differences is reasonable enough, the literature on aging and context effects has produced two types of findings that are more consistent with the opposite prediction, namely that aging should have the effect of minimizing cultural differences in cognitive processing style. One body of evidence suggests that aging is associated with declines in memory for context (see Spencer & Raz, 1995, for a review), and declines in the ability to bind content with context (Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996; Chua, Chen, & Park, 2006). If aging has the effect of reducing East Asians ability to bind object and background, then we would expect older East Asians to behave more like the object-oriented Westerners. In other words, we would predict that age would have the effect of reducing or eliminating the cultural differences in Chua et al. s (2005) object-recognition task. A second body of evidence suggests that older adults rely on context more so than younger adults do, presumably as a way of compensating for their deficits in processing capacity (Baltes, 1997; Pichora- Fuller, Schneider, & Daneman, 1995; Speranza, Daneman, & Schneider, 2000). If aging has the effect of increasing Westerners attention to context, then we would expect older Westerners to behave more like the context-sensitive East Asians. In other words, we would predict that age would have the effect of reducing or eliminating the cultural differences in Chua et al. s scene viewing and object-recognition tasks. By comparing the picture-scanning patterns and object-recognition performance of younger and older Westerners and East Asians, our design allowed us to investigate the impact of aging on cognitive processing styles.

13 Cognitive Processing Style 7 METHOD Participants There were 104 participants in this study belonging to the following four groups: (1) Twenty-six Chinese students (16 males, 10 females) at the University of Toronto. Their ages ranged from 19 to 32 years (M = years, SD = 3.29), and their mean years of education was years (SD = 2.30). They were all born and raised in China, and had been in Canada for less than 4 years (M = 1.27); (2) Twenty-five European Canadian students (11 males and 14 females) at the University of Toronto. Their ages ranged from 18 to 26 years (M = 20.88, SD = 2.186), and their mean years of education was years (SD= 1.76). Both Chinese and Canadian students were recruited by campus posters or by an on-line Psychology Experiments booking system; (3) Twenty-six older Chinese adults (11 males and 15 females). Their age ranged from 64 to 79 years (M = 71.00, SD = 4.55), and their mean years of education was years (SD = 3.34). The mean number of years that they had been in Canada was 6.15 years (SD = 3.46). Participants were recruited by sending information to Chinese community organizations in Toronto. Most of the participants in this group were visiting parents; (4) Twenty-seven older European Canadian adults (9 males, 18 females). Their age ranged from 65 to 82 years (M = 70.52, SD = 4.51), and the mean years of education was years (SD = 2.94). Participants were recruited from the local community in Mississauga, Ontario.

14 Cognitive Processing Style 8 A screening procedure was used during recruitment, and only participants in good health and with no history of serious pathology (e.g., stroke, head injury, neurological disease, seizures) were included in the study. All participants had normal or corrected-tonormal vision. Participants were tested individually in a single session lasting approximately 1 hour, and they were paid $ 10 per hour for their participation. The session consisted of two phases: (a) a study phase during which participants viewed 36 pictures while their eye movements were monitored, (b) an object-recognition phase during which participants were given 72 pictures and asked to judge which of them depicted the same objects that had appeared during the picture viewing phase. Study Phase Materials. The study materials consisted of the identical 36 pictures used by Chua et al. (2005). Chua et al. obtained their pictures from the COREL image collection (Corel, Eden Prarie, MN). Using Adobe Photoshop Software, they manipulated the images to create 36 pictures, each with a single, focal, foreground object (nonliving thing or animal) against a realistic complex background. See Figure 2 for two sample pictures, and Appendix A for the complete set of 36 pictures. Most of the pictures were culturally neutral, while a few of them had Western or Asian objects or background (see Chua et al., 2005, for details).

15 Cognitive Processing Style 9 (a) Study: Nonliving object (b) Study: Animal object (c) Recognition: old object/old background (d) Recognition: old object /new background (e) Recognition: new object /old background (f) Recognition: new object /new background Fig. 2. Sample pictures from the Study Phase (a & b) and the Object-Recognition Phase (c, d, e, & f).

16 Cognitive Processing Style 10 Procedure. Participants were instructed that they would be viewing a series of pictures on the computer screen, one at a time. Before each picture was presented, there would be a blue screen with a cross sign (+) in the centre of it. Participants were required to look at the cross sign to initiate the picture presentation. Once the picture appeared on the screen, they were free to move their eyes to look at the picture. They were told that after a few seconds, the picture would disappear, and be replaced by a gray screen. At this time, their task was to orally say a number between 1 and 7, indicating the degree to which they liked the picture (1 = don t like at all; 4 = neutral; 7 = like very much). Then, when ready for the next picture, they were to press the space bar, and the next blue screen with cross sign would appear. One sample picture was presented before the real experiment began to make sure that participants understood the procedure. After that, the actual task of viewing and rating the 36 pictures began. Each picture was displayed on the screen for 3 s. The older Chinese participants were given the instructions in Mandarin. While participants were viewing the pictures, their eye movements were recorded by an eye tracker (Eyelink 1000, SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Canada). The participant used a chinrest with a head support to minimize head movement. The distance of the chinrest from the monitor was 55 cm. The sampling rate was set to 1000 Hz (1- msec temporal resolution). In the present study, the configurable acceleration and velocity thresholds were set to detect saccades of 0.5º or greater. Only the participant s dominant eye was tracked in our study. We used two computer monitors for this scene perception task. One was used to display the instructions and pictures to the participants (17 ViewSonic 17PS), and the other one was used to display real-time feedback about

17 Cognitive Processing Style 11 the gaze position. Eye-tracking calibration was obtained at the beginning of the experiment, and recalibration was conducted during the experiment if needed. After the study phase, participants were moved to another room to do an arithmetic distractor task for 10 minutes. Object-recognition Phase Materials. For the object-recognition task, the original 36 objects and backgrounds used in the study phase, together with 36 new objects and backgrounds were manipulated to create a set of 72 pictures of the following composition: (a) 18 pictures with old (previously seen) objects and the original old backgrounds (old object/old background); (b) 18 pictures of old objects with new backgrounds (old object/new background), 18 pictures of new objects with old backgrounds (new object/old background), and 18 pictures of new objects with new backgrounds (new object/new background). All of the new combinations of objects and backgrounds were quite natural and reasonable. Figure 2 shows examples from the four conditions and Appendices B and C provide all 72 pictures. All participants saw the same set and sequence of trials (see also Chua et al., 2005). Procedure. Participants were brought back to the same computer room to complete the object-recognition task. They were told that they would be viewing pictures again. However, this time their task was to judge whether they had seen the object before, that is, whether the particular animal, car, train, boat etc was exactly the same as the one seen during the study phase. Participants were instructed to press a key labeled YES if they recognized seeing the object before, and a key labeled NO if they thought the

18 Cognitive Processing Style 12 object was new. If they were not sure, they were told that they could make a guess. Participants were informed that each picture would only be shown for a brief period. They were encouraged to make their response as quickly as possible, but they were still allowed to respond even after the picture had been removed. To make sure that participants understood the instructions, two sample pictures were shown before the experiment started. Once participants demonstrated that they understood the task, the real task began. The 72 pictures, 36 with the original objects and 36 with lure objects, were presented one at a time for 3 s each. After the participant inputted a response, the next picture would appear. After the object-recognition test, participants were tested for their familiarity with the objects. The 72 pictures used in the object-recognition phase were presented again. Participants responded "yes" if they had seen the object either in real life or in pictures before participating in this study, and "no" if they had not. Because the familiarity ratings did not affect the pattern of results for the eye movement data or the object recognition data, they will not be discussed further. After completing their familiarity ratings, participants were paid for their participation and debriefed about the purposes of the study. Data Analysis One older Western adult had a below chance hit rate (<.50) on the objectrecognition task, averaged across conditions. This participant s data was excluded from all following statistical analyses (see also, Chua et al., 2005). Consequently, the analyses reported are based on 26 young Chinese, 25 young Canadian, 26 older Chinese, and 26 older Canadian participants.

19 Cognitive Processing Style 13 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Eye Movement Data The main dependent measure of interest was the proportion of dwell time spent fixating the focal object. This was simply the time spent fixating the focal object divided by the total dwell time for the whole trial. Figure 3, which provides a sample protocol of a participant viewing the picture of a fish in a background of coral, illustrates how proportion of dwell time on the focal object was computed. The two other dependent measures used were number of fixations on the object and the background, and average fixation time on the object and the background (see also Figure 3, for illustrations of how these measures were computed). Figure 4 provides mean performance on these three dependent measures as a function of cultural group (Chinese, Western) and age (younger, older). Finally, Figure 5 shows the proportion of fixations to object versus background across the 3-s time course of a trial. Our first goal was to determine whether we replicated Chua et al. s (2005) findings of a cultural difference in eye-movement patterns for our young adult participants of Chinese versus Western heritage. As Figure 4 shows, several aspects of our data were consistent with Chua et al. s finding that Westerners tend to pay more attention to the focal object than do East Asians, whereas East Asians tend to focus on the background context more so than do Westerners. As Figure 4(a) shows, young Western participants spent 64% of trial time dwelling on the focal object and this was significantly longer than the 58% of trial time that young Chinese participants spent fixating the focal object, t(49) = 2.71, p <.01. The two groups did not differ in the number of fixations they made on objects, t(49) = 1.20, p >.23, but the Chinese students made significantly more

20 Cognitive Processing Style 14 Fig. 3 Sample protocol of a participant viewing the picture illustrated in Figure 2(b). The figure illustrates the location, duration, and sequence of each fixation. For this participant, the proportion of trial time spent fixating the object (the fish) was 52.28% (1344/2571); the number of fixations on the object was 6 and the number of fixations on the background was 5; average fixation time was 224 ms (1344/6) on the object, and ms (1227/5) on the background. fixations on the background than did their Western counterparts, t(49) = 2.41, p <.03 (see Figure 4b). And finally, for young Western adults, the average fixation duration to objects was grater than the average fixation duration to backgrounds, t(24) = 3.64, p <.002 (see Figure 4c). In contrast, young Chinese students did not show longer fixation durations on objects than on backgrounds, t(25) = 1.08, p >.28 (see Figure 4c). Together, these data were consistent with Chua et al. s finding that young Westerners tend to pay more attention to the focal object than do East Asians, whereas East Asians tend to focus on the background context more so than do Westerners. However, as we shall, these

21 Cognitive Processing Style 15 Proportion of dwell time on object Young Chinese Young Westerners Older Chinese Older Westerners (a) 8 Number of Fixations Young Chinese Young Westerners Older Chinese Older Westerners 0 Object Background (b) Average Fixation Time (ms) Object Background Young Chinese Young Westerners Older Chinese Older Westerners (c) Fig. 4 Eye-movement data as a function of cultural heritage and age. Panel (a) shows proportion of dwell time on the object; Panel (b) shows the mean number of fixations on the object and the background; Panel (c) shows average fixation time on the object and the background (in ms).

22 Cognitive Processing Style 16 cultural biases in viewing patterns did not appear to be related to later object-recognition performance in the present study, whereas they were in the Chua et al. study. The next question of interest was whether the cultural differences in scene scanning pattern persist with age. As Figure 4 shows, this appeared not the case. Older Westerners and older Chinese participants did not differ from each other in their relative attention to the focal object versus the background on any of the dependent measures (all ps >.10), and both showed a pattern very similar to that found for young Westerners, namely a pattern that favored attention to focal objects over backgrounds. In other words, it was only the younger Chinese participants who spent a disproportionate amount of time fixating on backgrounds. The difference between the young Chinese and the other three groups can be seen in Figure 5 which depicts the proportion of fixations to objects and background during the 3-s time course of a trial. As Figure 5 shows, the eye-fixation patterns for both younger and older Westerners and older Chinese participants are very similar, whereas the pattern for the younger Chinese participants diverges around 540 ms and beyond. Thus, it would appear that aging has the effect of reducing if not eliminating cultural differences in attentiveness to context. Object-recognition Data Figure 6 presents the object-recognition data as a function of background (old, vs. new), culture (Chinese vs. Western) and age (younger, older). Whereas Chua et al. reported only the hit rates, our data are expressed in terms of hits minus false alarms to control for potential differences in response bias.

23 Cognitive Processing Style Proportion of Fixations Young Chinese_Object Young Chinese_Background Young Westerners_Object Young Westerners_Background Older Chinese_Object Older Chinese_Background Older Westerners_Object Older Westerners_Background Time (ms) Fig. 5. Proportion of fixations to objects or backgrounds, across the 3-s time course of a trial. The data were averaged every 10 ms for the first 1500 ms, and every 50 ms for the second 1500 ms. The sum of proportions at each time point may be not total 100% because occasionally the participants were not fixating either the object or the background, as during a saccade or blink. Again, the first goal was to determine whether we replicated Chua et al. s (2005) finding that Chinese participants object recognition performance is more accurate when the object is presented in its original background than when it is presented in a novel background, whereas Westerners object recognition performance is unaffected by the manipulation of background context. As Figure 6 clearly shows, we did not replicate the effect. Like Chua et al., we found that young Chinese students recognition performance was significantly better when the object was presented on an original background (M

24 Cognitive Processing Style 18 =.40) than on a new background (M =.25), t(25) = 4.30, p <.002, a finding that Chua et al. interpreted as evidence that East Asians bind object with context. However, unlike Chua et al., we found that maintaining the original background had an equally facilitative effect on young Westerners recognition performance as it did on the Chinese. As Figure 6 shows, young Westerners were significantly better at recognizing objects when presented on old backgrounds (M =.55) than on new backgrounds (M =.21), t (24) = 5.55, p <.01. These findings were confirmed in an analysis of variance (ANOVA) which showed a highly significant effect of background type, F(1, 49) = 49.52, MSE =.02, p <.01, but no effect of culture (F < 1), and no background type by culture interaction, F(1, 49) = 2.34, MSE =.02, p <.12. Thus, even though our young Westerners appeared to be paying less attention to the background when encoding the scenes than did their Chinese counterparts, their recognition performance suggested that they were binding object with background to the same extent Old Background New Background Hits - False Alarms Young Chinese Young Westerners Older Chinese Older Westerners Fig. 6 Hits minus false alarms on the object-recognition task as a function of background (old vs. new), culture (Chinese vs. Western), and age (younger vs. older).

25 Cognitive Processing Style 19 Our strongest finding was an age-related difference in the effect that a changed background had on memory. Whereas young participants of both cultures benefited from the maintenance of the original background, older participants demonstrated no such facilitation. As Figure 6 shows, older participants of both cultures had overall poorer recognition performance than did their younger counterparts, F (1, 99) = 19.58, MSE =.02, p <.001. However, the striking finding was a highly significant age by background type interaction, F (1, 99) = 20.88, MSE =.02, p <.001. This interaction was a result of the fact that younger participants showed better object-recognition performance when the background was old (M =.43) than when it was new (M =.23), t = 6.92, p <.001, whereas older participants showed equivalent recognition performance whether the background was old (M =.24) or new (M =.22), t =.717, p >.47. In other words, older adults recognition performance did not appear to benefit from the maintenance of the original background. There are several possible reasons for why older adults did not benefit from the maintenance of the original background. One possibility is that older adults had poorer memory for the backgrounds in the first place (Nilsson, 2003). If this were the case, then there could be no advantage of keeping the background constant because an original background would not be able to provide a useful cue for memory retrieval. A second possibility is that older adults are less capable of binding object and context (Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996; Chua, et al., 2006). Older adults may have remembered the backgrounds as well as the younger adults did, but their binding deficit made it harder for them to correctly associate an object with its particular background. If this were the case, there would again be no advantage of keeping the background constant because the intact

26 Cognitive Processing Style 20 background would not be an effective cue for memory retrieval. Future research is needed to tease out these possible explanations of the aging effect. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Recent claims have been made that East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Because of cultural norms that emphasize relationships and group functions, East Asians develop a bias toward paying attention to context, and encoding stimuli in a holistic fashion. In contrast, the individualistic society of Westerners produces a bias toward paying more attention to focal objects, and processing them more analytically. Behavioral evidence for differences in cognitive processing styles has come from tasks measuring memory judgments (Ji et al., 2000; Kitayama et al., 2003), Stroop interference (Ishii et al., 2003) and scene perception (Masuda, & Nisbett, 2001; Chua et al., 2005). For example, by measuring the eye movements of American and Chinese students when viewing pictures, Chua et al. (2005) found that American students fixated more on the focal object, whereas Chinese students fixated more on the background. In a subsequent object-recognition task, the Chinese students were less likely to correctly recognize old objects presented in new backgrounds, suggesting that they tended to bind object with background. In the present study, we tried to do a replication of the Chua et al. (2005) eye movement and recognition memory findings with a group of young adult students of European-Canadian and Chinese descent; we also wanted to investigate whether aging modulates these cultural differences in cognitive processing style.

27 Cognitive Processing Style 21 Like Chua et al., we found that young Chinese students spent longer fixating the scene background than did their Western counterparts. However, we failed to replicate the accompanying memory bias observed by Chua et al. Instead of finding that maintaining the old background could only facilitate the recognition performance of young Chinese, we demonstrated that maintaining the original background had an equally facilitative effect on young Westerners recognition performance as it did on the Chinese. Then, even though young Westerners appeared to be paying less attention to the background when encoding the scenes than did their Chinese counterparts, their recognition performance suggested that they were binding object with background to the same extent. With regard to the aging effect, we found that older Westerners and older Chinese participants did not differ from each other in eye movement patterns. Rather, they both showed a pattern very similar to that found for young Westerners, namely a pattern that favored attention to focal objects over backgrounds. This finding suggests that aging has the effect of reducing if not eliminating cultural differences in attentiveness to context. This is probably because aging is associated with declines in memory for context (Spencer & Raz, 1995). East Asians ability to remember background decline with age, thus older East Asians would behave more like the object-oriented Westerners, which was actually observed in our study. The strongest finding of our research was to show an age-related difference in the effect that a changed background has on memory. Maintaining the original background facilitated memory for objects in young participants of both cultures. In marked contrast, older participants demonstrated no such facilitation. This result suggests that older adults

28 Cognitive Processing Style 22 had poorer memory for background details (Nilsson, 2003); therefore there were no advantage of keeping the background constant because an original background would not be able to provide a useful cue for memory retrieval. Another possibility is that older adults are less capable of binding object and context (Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996; Chua, et al., 2006). Older adults may have remembered the backgrounds as well as the younger adults did, but their binding deficit made it harder for them to correctly associate an object with its particular background. If this were the case, there would again be no advantage of keeping the background constant because the intact background would not be an effective cue for memory retrieval. Future research is needed to tease out these possible explanations of the aging effect.

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30 Cognitive Processing Style 25 Markus, H.R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 20, Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2001).Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (5), Nilsson, L.-G. (2003). Memory functioning in normal aging. Acta Neurologica Scandinavia, 107 (Suppl. 179), Nisbett, R. E., & Masuda, T. (2003). Culture and point of view. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100 (19), Nisbett, R.E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic vs. analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, Park, D.C., & Gutchess, A.H. (2006). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging and Culture. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15 (3), Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Schneider, B. A. & Daneman, M. (1995). How young and old adults listen to and remember speech in noise. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, Spencer, W. D., & Raz, N. (1995). Differential effects of aging on memory for content and context: A meta-analysis. Psychology and Aging, 10, Speranza, F., Daneman, M. & Schneider, B. A. (2000). How aging affects the reading of words in noisy backgrounds. Psychology and Aging, 15,

31 Cognitive Processing Style 27 Appendix A The 36 Pictures from the Study Phase P1_01 P1_04 P1_02 P1_05 P1_03 P1_06

32 Cognitive Processing Style 28 P1_07 P1_10 P1_08 P1_11 P1_09 P1_12

33 Cognitive Processing Style 29 P1_13 P1_16 P1_14 P1_17 P1_15 P1_18

34 Cognitive Processing Style 30 P1_19 P1_22 P1_20 P1_23 P1_21 P1_24

35 Cognitive Processing Style 31 P1_25 P1_28 P1_26 P1_29 P1_27 P1_30

36 Cognitive Processing Style 32 P1_31 P1_34 P1_32 P1_35 P1_33 P1_36

37 Cognitive Processing Style 33 Appendix B The 72 Pictures from the Object-Recognition Phase P2_01 P2_04 P2_02 P2_05 P2_03 P2_06

38 Cognitive Processing Style 34 P2_07 P2_10 P2_08 P2_11 P2_09 P2_12

39 Cognitive Processing Style 35 P2_13 P2_16 P2_14 P2_17 P2_15 P2_18

40 Cognitive Processing Style 36 P2_19 P2_22 P2_20 P2_23 P2_21 P2_24

41 Cognitive Processing Style 37 P2_25 P2_28 P2_26 P2_29 P2_27 P2_30

42 Cognitive Processing Style 38 P2_31 P2_34 P2_32 P2_35 P2_33 P2_36

43 Cognitive Processing Style 39 P2_37 P2_40 P2_38 P2_41 P2_39 P2_42

44 Cognitive Processing Style 40 P2_43 P2_46 P2_44 P2_47 P2_45 P2_48

45 Cognitive Processing Style 41 P2_49 P2_52 P2_50 P2_53 P2_51 P2_54

46 Cognitive Processing Style 42 P2_55 P2_58 P2_56 P2_59 P2_57 P2_60

47 Cognitive Processing Style 43 P2_61 P2_64 P2_62 P2_65 P2_63 P2_66

48 Cognitive Processing Style 44 P2_67 P2_70 P2_68 P2_71 P2_69 P_72

49 Cognitive Processing Style 45 Appendix C Characteristics of Stimuli in Object-Recognition Task Object (0 = old, 1 = new) OO: Old object-old background ON: Old object-new background NO: New object-old background NN: New object-new background Key press (yes = j, no = f) Object (0 = old, 1 = new) Key press (yes = j, no = f) Phase 2 order Condition Phase 2 order Condition P2_01 OO 0 j P2_37 NO 1 f P2_02 NN 1 f P2_38 ON 0 j P2_03 ON 0 j P2_39 NN 1 f P2_04 OO 0 j P2_40 NO 1 f P2_05 NO 1 f P2_41 OO 0 j P2_06 NN 1 f P2_42 ON 0 j P2_07 ON 0 j P2_43 NN 1 f P2_08 NO 1 f P2_44 OO 0 j P2_09 ON 0 j P2_45 NN 1 f P2_10 NN 1 f P2_46 ON 0 j P2_11 NO 1 f P2_47 OO 0 j P2_12 ON 0 j P2_48 NN 1 f P2_13 NN 1 f P2_49 ON 0 j P2_14 NN 1 f P2_50 ON 0 j P2_15 NO 1 f P2_51 OO 0 j P2_16 OO 0 j P2_52 NO 1 f P2_17 NO 1 f P2_53 OO 0 j P2_18 OO 0 j P2_54 NO 1 f P2_19 ON 0 j P2_55 NN 1 f P2_20 ON 0 j P2_56 NN 1 f P2_21 NO 1 f P2_57 OO 0 j P2_22 NO 1 f P2_58 OO 0 j P2_23 OO 0 j P2_59 NO 1 f P2_24 NO 1 f P2_60 OO 0 j P2_25 NN 1 f P2_61 ON 0 j P2_26 NN 1 f P2_62 ON 0 j P2_27 ON 0 j P2_63 NN 1 f P2_28 NN 1 f P2_64 ON 0 j P2_29 OO 0 j P2_65 NO 1 f P2_30 ON 0 j P2_66 NN 1 f P2_31 NN 1 f P2_67 ON 0 j P2_32 NO 1 f P2_68 OO 0 j P2_33 OO 0 j P2_69 NO 1 f P2_34 NO 1 f P2_70 OO 0 j P2_35 OO 0 j P2_71 NO 1 f P2_36 NN 1 f P2_72 ON 0 j