Categorical Organization in Free Recall across Culture and Age (original) (raw)
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The interaction between age and culture can have various implications for cognition as age represents the effect of biological processes whereas culture represents the effect of sustaining experiences. Nevertheless, their interaction has rarely been examined. Thus, based on the fact that Asians are more intuitive in reasoning than Americans, we examined how this cultural difference might interact with age. Young and old participants from the US and Singapore performed a categorization task (living vs. non-living). To measure their reliance on intuition, we manipulated the typicality of targets (animate vs. inanimate). We showed that (1) RTs for inanimate organisms were slower than RTs for animate organisms (atypicality cost), (2) the cost was particularly large for older adults and (3) an age × culture interaction was observed such that cultural differences in the cost (Singaporeans > Americans) was found only among older participants. Further, we demonstrated that the age effect was associated with cognitive function and the culture effect among older adults was associated with cultural values. Finally, a moderated mediation analysis suggests that cognitive function and cultural values interact with each other in order to jointly influence one's cognition.
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There is evidence that East Asians are biased to process information in a holistic, contextual fashion, whereas Western Europeans process information in an analytic, feature-based style. We argue that these cultural differences in information processing styles are so pervasive that they affect cognitive function at the most basic levels, including the mechanics of cognition. However, as individuals age, it is not always the case that culture effects on cognitive processes magnify, despite many additional years of exposure to the culture. Neurobiological decline in cognitive function that occurs with age is a cognitive universal and can limit the strategies used in late adulthood, resulting in more similarity in cognitive function in late adulthood across cultures than is observed in young adulthood We present a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of aging on cognitive function cross-culturally. The importance of developing culture-invariant measures of processing resources is emphasized and methodological issues associated with the cross-cultural study of aging are addressed
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Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie, 1982
It is hypothesized that age deficits in recall are due to a reduction in available processing resource. It is argued that the formation of a distinct encoding in which unique aspects of the context are integrated with the target item requires a substantial amount of attentional resource, but that the core semantic features of words are encoded relatively automatically. Thus, under conditions of reduced processing resource, a general, stereotyped encoding will result. The effectiveness of general, categorical retrieval cues was compared to the effectiveness of contextually specific retrieval cues in three experiments. Young adults recalled more than old adults when they were cued with specific retrieval cues, but no age differences were observed when general retrieval cues were used. A similar pattern of results was obtained when the amount of processing resource was experimentally reduced by requiring young adults to perform a concurrent task during encoding. Many recent views of human memory have been couched in terms of encoding processes, retrieval processes, and their interrelations. Within such a
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