Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging, Culture and Cognition

University Of Texas Dallas, Richardson TX

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Abstract

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.