Memory Specificity Across Cultures

Recent evidence suggests that culture can operate as a lens, bringing distinct aspects of one’s environment into focus based on cultural priorities, values and experiences. Individuals from Western cultures tend to focus on that which is object-based, categorically related or self-relevant whereas people from Eastern cultures tend to focus more on contextual details, similarities and group-relevant information. For example, when asked to describe animated vignettes of underwater scenes, American descriptions focus on the prominent fish in the scene, Japanese participants, on the other hand, incorporate many more contextual details, such as the colour of the seaweed and water and the relationship of the fish to the other elements in the scene.1 These different ways of perceiving the world suggest that culture shapes the ways in which individuals attend to and remember aspects of complex environments.