Cultural Neuroscience: A Historical Introduction and Overview

The integration of cognitive neuroscience with the study of culture emerged from independent ascensions among both fields in the early 1990s. This marriage of the two previously unconnected areas of inquiry has generated a variety of empirical and theoretical works that have provided unique insights to both partners that might have otherwise gone overlooked. Here, I provide a brief historical introduction to the emergence of cultural neuroscience from its roots in cultural psychology and cognitive neuroscience to its present stature as one of the most challenging but rewarding sub-disciplines to have come from the burgeoning growth of the study of the brain and behavior. In doing so, I overview some of the more studied areas within cultural neuroscience: language, music, mathematics, visual perception, and social cognition. I conclude with a discussion of how both parent fields (cognitive neuroscience and cultural psychology) have reciprocally benefited from the involvement of the other. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol9/iss2/1 Historical Background In 1991, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama published a seminal review that brought cultural psychology to the attention of mainstream researchers in psychology. Previously an interdisciplinary subfield of social psychology, cultural differences in thought and behavior constituted a topic of interest to anthropologists, linguists, and scholars of communication as much or more than it was to psychologists. Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) paper changed that by effectively integrating questions about cultural differences with questions of interest to researchers in social cognition (the dominant theoretical focus of social psychology at the time). Although scholars have not uniformly accepted some of Markus and Kitayama’s arguments and questioned the magnitude of empirical support behind them (e.g., Matsumoto, 1999; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002), their paper has garnered over 12,000 citations to date, positioning it as arguably the most influential paper in cultural psychology and one of the most cited in all of the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, the work marked a new era for cultural psychology and a historical turning point that provided momentum for rebirth of the study of culture among scholars in psychology. At approximately the same time that Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) review was reshaping the fate of cultural psychology, a separate set of exciting advances was occurring in neuroscience. Researchers at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in 1990 and at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1991 independently developed the ability to reliably track bloodflow within the brain, setting the foundation for a revolution in cognitive neuroscience (see Kwong, 2012, for a historical review). It was not long until studies of human brain activity were being published using this technological innovation (e.g., Belliveau et al., 1991), touching off an explosion of interest in cognitive neuroscience over the next decade. The degree to which psychology departments embraced this new hybrid field was revolutionary: they invested unprecedented resources in acquiring functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanners, hired physicists and neurologists onto their faculties, and even changed their names to highlight the new “brain sciences” (Jaffe, 2011). The number of brain-imaging studies in psychology grew exponentially by the new millennium and has continued to rise in the last 25 years (e.g., Derrfuss & Mar, 2009). It was not long after this renaissance in cognitive neuroscience that a second generation of offspring fields developed. Perhaps the most prominent of these has been social neuroscience (also called “social cognitive neuroscience” and “social cognitive affective neuroscience”; see Lieberman, 2006). Rather than applying measures of brain activity and brain-mapping to questions about basic cognition (e.g., the representation of different patterns in the visual cortex; Le Bihan et al., 1993), researchers began using these tools to ask questions about social thought and social behavior. Social neuroscience quickly splintered into a host of topic-based fields such as personality neuroscience, affective neuroscience, and neuroeconomics, each with their own flavor and inspiration from a distinct tradition that shared some interest with questions previously asked by social psychologists (i.e., personality psychologists, interdisciplinary emotion researchers, and economists, respectively). Most notable to the current work, cultural neuroscience (also 3 Rule: Cultural Neuroscience Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 referred to as “transcultural neuroscience;” Han & Northoff, 2008) was among these as well. Cultural neuroscience may best be defined as the application of cognitive neuroscience tools to answering questions about cultural differences in thought and behavior. Similar to neuroeconomics, affective neuroscience, and personality neuroscience, cultural neuroscience shares overlap with the interests of social neuroscientists but also touches on topics of interest that are broader than those addressed in psychology. Not unlike its parent discipline of cultural psychology, the content area of cultural neuroscience is interdisciplinary: relevant to scholars in anthropology, linguistics, communication, sociology, and others within the social sciences. Cognitive neuroscience, too, is an interdisciplinary field, traditionally attracting interest from researchers in cognition, perception, vision sciences, medicine, physics, physiology, and a host of other disciplines in the natural sciences (see Gazzaniga, 1984). The product of this merging is therefore a field that is simultaneously very broad in the number of domains to which it is connected and also quite narrow in that it is limited to questions and phenomena within these fields that are only related to cultural differences. This has resulted in a veritable cornucopia of research published in cultural neuroscience, ranging from questions about basic cognition (e.g., neural correlates of mathematical processing across cultures; Tang et al., 2006) to questions about high-level social phenomena (e.g., brain regions associated with election outcomes in different nations; Rule, Freeman, Moran, Gabrieli, & Ambady, 2010). Since its inception, cultural neuroscience has come to envelope a variety of topics and has spawned a number of edited volumes (e.g., Han & Pöppel, 2011) and special issues of journals (e.g., Chiao, 2010) devoted to cultural neuroscience exclusively. The questions investigated in these areas have continued to be wide-ranging and have even grown to include other elements of neuroscience that extend beyond the brain, such as genetic factors that differ crossculturally and interact with the cognitive and behavioral processes more traditionally studied in cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Way & Lieberman, 2010). Empirical work in cognitive neuroscience can be logistically challenging and many of these challenges are only compounded by those inherent to conducting cross-cultural work. A common assumption (and, thus, criticism—see Poldrack, 2010) of cognitive neuroscience is that the brain’s structure and function are equivocally linked. Harkening back to phrenological claims about the areas of the brain that are responsible for particular thoughts (such as described by Browne, 1869, for example), there is a temptation in brainmapping to isolate “the part of the brain that does X.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the operations of the brain are not so simple. Although there may be correlations between measures of metabolism, bloodflow, or electroconductivity in the brain with specific or general classes of thought and behavior, these data are only suggestive (e.g., Horwitz, 2003). An important distinction is therefore that cognitive neuroscience may provide instruments to test hypotheses about brain function and behavior, rather than objective measurements of cognitive processes or their sequelae. Much of cognitive neuroscience has been, and presently remains, exploratory and this may be particularly true of its offspring fields like cultural neuroscience that are working at the frontiers of what is known. 4 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 9, Subunit 2, Chapter 1 http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol9/iss2/1 In terms of theory, measurement, and analysis (for which there are many variables requiring consideration; see Poldrack et al., 2008), cognitive neuroscience is still an emerging field. Hence, its offspring, such as cultural neuroscience, depend critically upon the resolution of a great many issues within the parent. Exacerbating this, cultural neuroscience invites unique complications of its own. For instance, if one wishes to truly compare the brain response of individuals from two cultures, it is best if data are collected using the same fMRI scanner, or at least using the same model of fMRI scanner. The calibrations and parameters that must be programmed into a scanning protocol are also highly multivariate even within the same machine. Thus, great care must be taken to assure that a long list of variables is kept constant in addition to all of the usual challenges and preconditions of cross-cultural work, such as the possible overreliance upon dichotomies (interdependent versus independent; East versus West) that may not capture the breadth of cultural differences (e.g., Sperber, Devellis, & Boehlecke, 1994; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997; Weeks, Swerissen, & Belfrage, 2007). Indeed, a key limitation of cultural psychology that is magnified in cultural neuroscience is the solicitation of participants from wealthy nations that possess the resources needed to carry out such studies (see Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010, and Chiao & Cheon, 2010, for related discussion). This, in combination with the relatively small sample sizes inherent to many studies in neuroscience (e.g., Button et al., 2013), can exacerbate a researcher’s ability to generalizing to entire cultures or nations. The practical limitations relevant to cultural neuroscience have hindered its progression relative to the rapid expansion of its peer fields (e.g., neuroeconomics). Yet, despite these staggering challenges, there have been impressive advances in understanding the interface between culture and the brain across a number of different research areas. Below, I provide a brief review of the variety of research in cultural neuroscience to date. This is principally organized into sections based on contributing subfields, all of which are bound by their shared interest in the role that cultural variation might contribute to differences in cognitive and perceptual processing: language, music, mathematics, visual perception, and social cognition. As the overview of each of these topics represents merely a taste of each, readers are encouraged to consult the Further Reading section below to gain satiety with any particular area of specific interest.