EAPSI: Exploring How Perceptions of Autonomy Influence Cross-Cultural Differences in Cognition

美国人和中国人思考和感知世界的方式不同。美国人经常把注意力集中在视野中的特定物体上，认为它们独立于周围环境中的其他物体。中国人经常把注意力集中在视野中的所有物体上，认为它们与周围的环境是相互依存的。为什么会发生这种情况？EAPSI研究员将与中国北京大学的跨文化心理学和社会神经科学专家韩世辉博士合作，研究这些差异产生的原因。最终，这项研究将导致人们对认知和感知中文化差异的原因有更深入的了解，从而有可能促进具有不同文化的国家之间的相互理解。本项目研究的假设是，美国人和中国人在分析认知和整体认知方面的差异是由各自社会的社会规范造成的。中国社会比美国社会更严格，对越轨行为的社会和制度惩罚更大，这应该会导致中国人在各种情况下都感到更受约束。因此，对于中国人来说，关注焦点和外围事件、线索和物体以及它们与其他环境特征的关系是适应性的。感知约束将被操纵与图像启动任务，以检查对分析和整体认知的四个措施的影响。这些实验的发现有望有助于解决跨文化心理学中关于文化行为的基本动机基础的重要理论争论。该奖项由国家科学基金会与中国科技部共同资助。

Americans and Chinese think about and perceive the world differently. Americans often focus their attention on specific objects in their field of vision and view them as independent from other objects in their environment. Chinese often focus their attention on all objects in their field of vision and view them as interdependent with their environment. Why does this happen? In collaboration with Dr. Shihui Han of Peking University in Beijing, China, an expert in cross-cultural psychology and social neuroscience, the EAPSI fellow will investigate why these differences arise. Ultimately, this research will lead to greater understanding about the causes of cultural differences in cognition and perception thereby potentially contributing to enhancement of mutual understanding between nations of distinctive cultures.This project deals with the hypothesis that the differences in analytic and holistic cognition between Americans and Chinese result from the social norms of their respective societies. Chinese society is tighter than American society and exhibits greater social and institutional punishment for norm deviance, which should result in Chinese feeling more constraint across contexts. Consequently, it would be adaptive for Chinese to pay attention to both focal and peripheral events, cues, and objects and what they mean in relation to other environmental features. The perceived constraint will be manipulated with a pictorial priming task to examine the effect on four measures of analytic and holistic cognition. Findings from these experiments are expected to contribute to the resolution of an important theoretical debate in cross-cultural psychology that concerns the basic motivational underpinnings of cultural behavior. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.