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Cross cultural differences in unconscious knowledge
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 13:50 authored by Sachiko Kiyokawa, Zoltan DienesZoltan Dienes, Daisuke Tanaka, Ayumi Yamada, Louise CrowePrevious studies have indicated cross cultural differences in conscious processes, such that Asians have a global preference and Westerners a more analytical one. We investigated whether these biases also apply to unconscious knowledge. In Experiment 1, Japanese and UK participants memorized strings of large (global) letters made out of small (local) letters. The strings constituted one sequence of letters at a global level and a different sequence at a local level. Implicit learning occurred at the global and not the local level for the Japanese but equally at both levels for the English. In Experiment 2, the Japanese preference for global over local processing persisted even when structure existed only at the local but not global level. In Experiment 3, Japanese and UK participants were asked to attend to just one of the levels, global or local. Now the cultural groups performed similarly, indicating that the bias largely reflects preference rather than ability (although the data left room for residual ability differences). In Experiment 4, the greater global advantage of Japanese rather English was confirmed for strings made of Japanese kana rather than Roman letters. That is, the cultural difference is not due to familiarity of the sequence elements. In sum, we show for the first time that cultural biases strongly affect the type of unconscious knowledge people acquire
History
Publication status
- Published
Journal
CognitionISSN
1873-7838Publisher
ElsevierExternal DOI
Issue
1Volume
124Page range
16-24Department affiliated with
- Psychology Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2012-11-20Usage metrics
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