Cultural specialization of visual cortex.

A growing body of evidence suggests culture influences how individuals perceive the world around them. This study investigates whether these cultural differences extend to a simple object viewing task and visual cortex by examining voxel pattern representations with multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA). During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, 20 East Asian and 20 American participants viewed photos of everyday items, equated for familiarity and conceptual agreement across cultures.

Cross-cultural differences in the neural correlates of specific and general recognition.

Research suggests that culture influences how people perceive the world, which extends to memory specificity, or how much perceptual detail is remembered. The present study investigated cross-cultural differences (Americans vs East Asians) at the time of encoding in the neural correlates of specific versus general memory formation. Participants encoded photos of everyday items in the scanner and 48 h later completed a surprise recognition test.