Influence of culture on visual working memory: evidence of a cultural response bias for remote Australian Indigenous chi
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RESEARCH PAPER
Influence of culture on visual working memory: evidence of a cultural response bias for remote Australian Indigenous children Melissa R. Freire
. Kristen Pammer
Received: 12 May 2020 / Revised: 31 July 2020 / Accepted: 17 August 2020 Ó Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract Evidence for cross-cultural response biases is now relatively ubiquitous in psychological research, however the idea that cultural differences might influence neurocognitive performance remains relatively underexplored. We objectively measured different response strategies of Indigenous and nonIndigenous children using signal detection theory to examine whether the way they responded (measured as response bias) might affect their perceived visual working memory ability (measured as detection sensitivity). We conceptualised response bias as whether children responded more liberally or conservatively when determining whether they observed a change in temporally-presented change-detection stimuli. We present quantitative evidence that remote Indigenous children employ more conservative decision making strategies than non-Indigenous children when completing visual working memory tasks. Evidence presented here of cross-cultural differences in decision-making during cognitive performance highlights the importance of considering cross-cultural differences when conducting cognitive research, and suggests a need to evaluate whether such M. R. Freire (&) K. Pammer Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Science Road, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Pammer School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia
differences may affect task performance. This evidence also highlights the need to evaluate whether such differences may affect task performance in applied settings, for example within the domain of literacy acquisition. Keywords Indigenous culture Memory Visual working memory Change detection Response bias Signal detection
Introduction Nearly 40 years ago Kearins published evidence that Indigenous children from the remote Western Desert region of Australia performed significantly better than age-matched non-Indigenous children on a visuospatial memory task (Kearins 1981). This task required children to memorise the spatial location of an array of natural or artefactual items arranged on a grid. Items were then removed from the grid and children were required to replace each item in the spatial location they remembered seeing it. Kearins subsequently observed Indigenous parents teaching children using predominantly visual instruction strategies that encouraged learning by observation and replication, which was distinctly different to non-Indigenous custom that relied much more on verbal instruction strategies (Kearins 1986). Kearins thus cited
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J Cult Cogn Sci
differences in cultural practice as a primary explanation for her findings, suggesting that that Indig
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