CULTURE MODULATES PERCEPTUAL ATTENTION: AN EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL STUDY

Previous work shows that European Americans are more likely than Asians to focus their attention on a central object. The authors investigated the time course of this cultural difference by examining event-related potentials (ERPs) as participants tried to detect a low-frequency target (an image of a coffee mug) embedded in a series of standard stimuli (animal images). The authors identified a reliable cultural difference as early as 200 ms posttarget, with a significantly larger negativity at the frontal region of the brain (called N2; indicative of early orienting) for European Americans than for Asian Americans. Furthermore, a slow wave component starting around 700 ms posttarget (indicative of elaborative processing) was also larger for European Americans than for Asian Americans. Together, the current evidence suggests that as compared to Asians, European Americans allocate more attention to a goal-relevant object from the very beginning of stimulus processing. Implications for social vision are discussed.