Final Dataset - Does culture moderate the encoding and recognition of negative cues? Evidence from an eye-tracking study

Cross-cultural research has elucidated many important differences between people from Western European and East Asian cultural backgrounds regarding how each group encodes and consolidates the contents of complex visual stimuli. While Western European groups typically demonstrate a perceptual bias towards centralised information, East Asian groups favour a perceptual bias towards background information. However, this research has largely focused on the perception of neutral cues and thus questions remain regarding cultural group differences in both the perception and recognition of negative, emotionally significant cues. The present study therefore compared Western European (<i>n</i> = 42) and East Asian (<i>n</i><i> </i>= 40) participants on a free-viewing task and a subsequent memory task utilising negative and neutral social cues. Attentional deployment to the centralised versus background components of negative and neutral social cues was indexed via eye-tracking, and memory was assessed with a cued-recognition task two days later. While both groups demonstrated an attentional bias towards the centralised components of the neutral cues, only the Western European group demonstrated this bias in the case of the negative cues. There were no significant differences observed between Western European and East Asian groups in terms of memory accuracy, although the Western European group was unexpectedly less sensitive to the centralised components of the negative cues. These findings suggest that culture modulates low-level attentional deployment to negative information, however not higher-level recognition after a temporal interval. This paper is, to our knowledge, the first to concurrently consider the effect of culture on both attentional outcomes and memory for both negative and neutral cues.

跨文化研究已阐明，西欧与东亚文化背景的个体在复杂视觉刺激内容的编码与巩固方式上存在诸多重要差异。西欧群体通常表现出对中心信息的知觉偏向，而东亚群体则更倾向于背景信息导向的知觉偏向。然而，此类研究大多聚焦于中性线索的知觉加工，因此关于文化群体在负性情绪显著性线索的知觉与识别上是否存在差异，仍有待进一步探讨。为此，本研究针对42名西欧籍与40名东亚籍被试，开展了包含负性与中性社会线索的自由观看任务及后续记忆任务实验。研究通过眼动追踪（eye-tracking）技术，量化了被试对负性与中性社会线索的中心成分与背景成分的注意分配情况，并于两天后采用线索回忆任务评估其记忆表现。尽管两组被试均对中性线索的中心成分表现出注意偏向，但仅西欧群体在负性线索条件下呈现出该注意偏向。两组被试的记忆正确率未出现显著差异，但令人意外的是，西欧群体对负性线索的中心成分的敏感度更低。上述结果表明，文化会调节个体对负性信息的低阶注意分配，但不会影响经过时间间隔后的高阶识别能力。据我们所知，本研究首次同时探讨了文化对负性与中性线索的注意加工结果及记忆表现的影响。