There are significant differences in cognitive styles among different cultural groups. This is embodied in the fact that East Asians show a holistic cognitive processing style due to their collectivist culture, while Westerners show a feature-driven analytic processing style due to their individualistic culture. On the influence of culture on episodic memory, studies have found that westerners have advantages in the retrieval of specific information of item, while easterners tend to pay more attention to the context. However, whether there is a cultural difference in episodic memory retrieval, and the related cognitive neural mechanisms remain unclear. Therefore, this study intends to investigate the cognitive neural mechanism and cross一cultural differences of episodic memory retrieval using the item recognition and associative recognition paradigms and ERP technique.
Thirty一five Chinese young subjects and twenty-one German young subjects were recruited for the experiment. The combined images of the item and background were used as stimuli. Task one investigated the item recognition task scores of the subjects in different cultures under the new and old context. Task two required participants to make recognition judgments of intact and recombined image pairs, to investigate the associative recognition performance of the two groups of subjects. The event-related potentials were recorded during memory retrieval. The old/new effects were used to investigate cross-cultural differences in electrophysiological mechanisms of episodic memory retrieval.
The results showed that in the item recognition task, there was no significant cultural difference in behavioral scores between Chinese and German subjects. ERP results showed that both Chinese and German subjects showed significant frontal and parietal old/new effects under the old and new context. In the associative memory task, there was no significant cultural difference between Chinese subjects and German subjects in the behavioral performance of associative recognition. ERP results showed that correct recognitions of the intact pairs only evoked a significant frontal old/new effect among Chinese subjects and German subjects, suggesting was no significant cultural difference between Chinese and German subjects in associative memory retrieval.
In conclusion, this study found that there was no significant cultural difference in episodic memory retrieval between Chinese and German young people. These results provide a reference for the future cross-cultural comparative study of episodic memory in the elderly.
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