The Aging Mind Opportunities in Cognitive Research (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix F: Cultural Variations in Cognition: Implications for Aging Research
Appendix F: Cultural Variations in Cognition: Implications for Aging Research
Pages 218-237
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From page 218... ...
For example, performance on psychometric intelligence tests, which often involve working memory, speed of information processing, and inhibitory efficacy, steadily declines after midlife, and it is reasonable to hypothesize that this decline reflects an age-related loss of biological potential (Lindenberger and Baltes, 19941. At the same time, however, many basic cognitive skills and processes, especially those that are "culturally saturated" (Park et al., 1999)
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From page 219... ...
The primary mission of cultural psychology is to analyze the processes by which psyches and cultures construct each other, elucidating how cultures create and support psychological processes, and how these psychological tendencies in turn support, reproduce, and sometimes change the cultural systems (Fiske et al., 1998; Markus et al., 1996~. The cultural psychological perspective has been motivated by the emergence of findings and theories in the past decade that alert researchers in many behavioral and social science disciplines to the cultural specificity of some ofthe fundamental assumptions and phenomena ofthe respective fields.
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From page 220... ...
The preceding analysis conceptualizes culture as an assortment of cultural resources. These resources may be symbolic or material; personal, interpersonal, or institutional; relatively specific to concrete social settings or more generally encompassing the entire cultural group.
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Furthermore, because of biological decline associated with aging, optimization becomes increasingly difficult and, as a consequence, selection and compensation become the key factors in modulating successful aging. Unlike the present view, then, Baltes and colleagues assume that culture is a source of cognitive content for a relatively fixed machinery of the mind.
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222 CULTURAL VARIATIONS IN COGNITION FIGURE F-1 A Buddhist image of the life cycle as inscribed in a wall of a Thai temple.
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The collectively held life tasks serve the significant sociopsychological function of keeping the person on track. Notably, however, the contemporary European American views rarely specify in any detail or in any future-oriented way any age-graded tasks in the post-prime half of life.
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CULTURE AND BASIC COGNITIVE PROCESSES In recent years, significant advances have been made in the cultural psychology of cognitive processes. This advance is fueled by a growing number of cross-cultural studies that have documented considerable cultural variations in biases in inference, reasoning, memory, and attention.
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From page 225... ...
Memory of Contextual Information Although the significance of culturally divergent naive theories in social inference is beyond any doubt, it is quite misleading to attribute all cultural differences to the differences in naive theories that are stored in individual memory and that are referred to when the person draws inferences about other people or events. Evidence suggests that there exist considerable cultural differences in the operation of processing systems themselves, especially
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From page 226... ...
In contrast, American subjects were expected to be unlikely to spontaneously attend to the contextual stimuli, and therefore these stimuli would not be encoded along with the focal fish. To test these predictions, after the initial presentation of all the cartoon sequences, subjects were given a surprise recognition memory test under three different conditions.
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The high-context communicative practices appear to be grounded in a contrasting cultural assumption that the thoughts of each individual are knowable in principle once enough context is specified for an utterance. Existent evidence is consistent with Hall's analysis.
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Once socialized in such a linguistic or cultural system, individuals develop a wellpracticed attentional bias that favors vocal tone. If the culturally divergent attentional biases predicted above are overlearned through recurrent engagement in one or the other mode of daily communications, they should be quite immune to intentional control to nullify them.
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From page 229... ...
Social psychologists have long known that this tendency is quite strong and pervasive in European American cultures. When people observe another person's behavior, they often immediately draw inferences about the person's internal attributes, such as attitudes, personality traits, or motives, that correspond to the observed behavior.
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Yet for the Japanese, the correspondence bias entirely vanished. These findings are consistent with the notion that Asian cultures cherish naive theories in which individuals are attuned to and sensitive to others or to situational constraints.
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Cognitive mechanics are fluid cognitive capacities that reflect the biologically based "hardware" of the mind, whose function is strictly determined by biological potential. Baltes and colleagues assume that these capacities are indexed, for example, by psychometric intelligence tests designed to measure speed of information processing, working memory capacity, processing resources, and the like with materials that are relatively free of specific cultural content.
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Accordingly, Park and colleagues hypothesize that cultural differences in relatively automatic cognitive operations (e.g., bias to spontaneously attend to figure versus context) should become more pronounced, but cultural differences in relatively deliberate cognitive operations (e.g., the relative ease of
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In Asian cultures, these conceptions are accompanied by a holistic mode of thought that confers considerable intuitive appeal on them. In both cases, cultural ideas about aging, rationality, and well-being are perceived to be real, which in turn may cause the reality of aging to change in accordance with the respective cultural world views.
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Choi, I., and R.E. Nisbett 1998 Situational salience and cultural differences in the correspondence bias and actorobserver bias.
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Malone 1995 The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin 117:21-38.
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1994 Cultural psychology: Bridging disciplinary boundaries in understanding the cultural grounding of self.
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Pyszczynski 1991 A terror management theory of social behavior: The psychological functions of selfesteem and cultural worldviews.
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