Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging, Culture and Cognition

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议的研究旨在为文化和认知的神经科学研究提供基准贡献，同时调查跨文化神经认知衰老的普遍性的关键重要问题。尽管有相当多的行为证据表明，东西方文化在知觉和记忆过程的组织方面存在差异，但这些差异背后的神经激活和组织尚未得到探索。简而言之，行为学证据表明，由于注重人际关系和群体功能的文化规范，东亚人比西方人更倾向于监控环境，从而在认知任务中更依赖情境和整体编码。相反，西方人的个人主义社会使他们更注重焦点对象和信息的分析处理。鉴于这些观察到的跨文化行为差异，本提案的第一个目的是评估文化如何塑造年轻人的神经活动。具体来说，我们假设东亚文化中的年轻人在研究复杂图片时，会表现出对内侧颞叶结构和专门负责关系和上下文处理的区域的高度参与，而美国人则会参与与战略、分析处理相关的额叶结构。该研究的第二个目标是了解跨文化的神经认知衰老，并确定老年西方样本中海马减少/额叶增加的模式是否反映在亚洲样本中。我们提出了一系列的研究，使我们能够评估经验（通过文化）和神经生物学（通过衰老）在塑造神经认知系统方面的相互作用。提出的研究还允许对神经认知老化中代偿性神经激活的关键理论进行精确的评估。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed studies are designed to yield benchmark contributions to the study of the neuroscience of culture and cognition, while simultaneously investigating critically important questions about the generality of neurocognitive aging across cultures. Although there is considerable behavioral evidence that there are differences in organization of perceptual and memory processes between Eastern and Western cultures, the neural activations and organization underlying these differences are unexplored. Briefly, behavioral evidence suggests that due to cultural norms that focus on relationships and group function, East Asians develop a bias to monitor their environment more than Westerners do, resulting in a greater reliance on context and holistic encoding on cognitive tasks. In contrast, the individualistic society of Westerners results in more attention to focal objects and analytic processing of information. Given these observed behavioral differences across cultures, the first aim of the present proposal is to evaluate how culture sculpts neural activity in young adults. Specifically, we hypothesize that young adults in East Asian cultures, when studying complex pictures, will show heightened engagement of medial temporal structures and areas specialized for relational and contextual processing, whereas Americans will engage frontal structures associated with strategic, analytic processing. A second goal of the research is to understand neurocognitive aging cross-culturally, and determine whether patterns of decreased hippocampal/increased frontal recruitment that occur in older Western samples are mirrored in Asian samples. We propose a series of studies that will allow us to assess the interplay between experience (through culture) and neurobiology (through aging) in sculpting the neurocognitive system. The proposed studies also permit a precise evaluation of key theories about compensatory neural activations in the neurocognitive aging.