The Cultural Neuroscience of Holistic Thinking

Author(s):  
Bobby K. Cheon ◽  
Rongxiang Tang ◽  
Joan Y. Chiao ◽  
Yi-Yuan Tang

Cultural diversity in patterns for understanding and conceptualizing one’s relationships with others may have led to diverse cultural systems for interpreting, thinking, and reasoning about the world. Eastern holistic systems of thought rely on connectedness and relations as a primary way of understanding the world, whereas Western analytic systems of thought rely on discreteness or substansiveness as an epistemological way of thinking. From attention and cognition to social cognitive processes, neural systems have likewise adapted differently across cultural contexts to facilitate divergent systems of social interactions and relations. This chapter reviews recent evidence for cultural influences on neural systems of analytic/holistic thinking, and discusses the relevance of this neuroscientific evidence, such as that from functional magnetic resonance imaging and analysis of event-related potentials, for cultural-psychological theories of holism and dialecticism.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Bigelow ◽  
Gillian M Clark ◽  
Jarrad Lum ◽  
Peter Gregory Enticott

Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion recognition tasks. Here we investigated whether language is associated with specific neurophysiological indicators of FEP. One hundred and fourteen children (4-12 years) completed a language assessment and a FEP task including stimuli depicting anger, happiness, fear, and neutrality. EEG was used to record key event related potentials (ERPs; P100, N170, LPP at occipital and parietal sites separately) previously shown to be sensitive to faces and facial emotion. While there were no main effects of language, the P100 latency to negative expressions appeared to increase with language, while LPP amplitude increased with language for negative and neutral expressions. These findings suggest that language is linked to some early physiological indicators of FEP, but this is dependent on the facial expression. Future studies should explore the role of language in later stages of neural processing, with a focus on processes localised to ventromedial prefrontal regions.


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 823-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Márk Molnár

We discuss whether low-dimensional chaos and even nonlinear processes can be traced in the electrical activity of the brain. Experimental data show that the dimensional complexity of the EEG decreases during event-related potentials associated with cognitive effort. This probably represents increased nonlinear cooperation between different neural systems during sensory information processing.


Author(s):  
Robert West

Life is filled with goals or intentions that people hope to realize. Some of these are rather mundane (e.g., remembering to purchase a key ingredient for a recipe when stopping at the market), while others are more significant (e.g., remembering to pick up one’s child from school at the end of the day). Prospective memory represents the ability to form and then realize intentions at an appropriate time. A fundamental aspect of prospective memory is that one is engaged in one or more tasks (i.e., ongoing activities) between the formation of an intention and the opportunity to realize the goal. For instance, in the shopping example, one might form the intention at home and then travel to the market and collect several other items before walking past the desired ingredient. Considerable research has demonstrated that the efficiency of prospective memory declines with age, although age-related differences are not universal. The neurocognitive processes underpinning age-related differences in the formation and realization of delayed intentions have been investigated in studies using event-related brain potentials. This research reveals that age-related differences in prospective memory arise from the disruption of neural systems supporting the successful encoding of intentions, the detection of prospective memory cues, and possibly processes supporting the retrieval of intentions from memory when a cue is encountered or efficiently shifting from the ongoing activity to the prospective element of the task. Therefore, strategies designed to ameliorate age-related declines in prospective memory should target a variety of processes engaged during the encoding, retrieval, and enactment of delayed intentions.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Baum ◽  
Milena Rabovsky ◽  
Sebastian Benjamin Rose ◽  
Rasha Abdel Rahman

Affective information about other people’s social behavior may prejudice social interactions and bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumours, lies, or so-called “fake news”. Here, we investigated how spontaneous person-likability and explicit person judgments are influenced by trustworthiness, employing event-related potentials as indexes of emotional brain responses. Social-emotional information about the (im)moral behaviour of previously unknown persons was verbally presented as trustworthy fact, (e.g. “He bullied his apprentice”) or marked as untrustworthy gossip (by adding e.g. allegedly), using verbal qualifiers that are frequently used in conversations, news and social media to indicate the questionable trustworthiness of the information and as a precaution against wrong accusations. In Experiment 1, spontaneous likability, deliberate person judgments and electrophysiological measures of emotional person evaluation were strongly influenced by negative information, yet remarkably unaffected by the trustworthiness of the information. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and extended them to positive information. Our findings demonstrate a tendency for strong emotional evaluations and person judgments even when they are knowingly based on unclear evidence.


2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 156
Author(s):  
Boukje Habets ◽  
Marlene Hense ◽  
Davide Bottari ◽  
Brigitte Roeder

Refractory period effects are defined as a temporal decrement in neural response due to a previous activation of the same system. We varied the ISI and modality of a preceding stimulus to investigate overlapping and distinct neural systems processing auditory and tactile stimuli. Auditory stimuli and tactile stimuli were presented in a sequential, random manner with a duration of 50 ms and an ISI of 1000 or 2000 ms. The P1–N1–P2 complex of event-related potentials (ERP) was analyzed separately for auditory and tactile stimuli, as a function of preceding ISI and modality. Main effects of ISI and modality were found within the time-window of the P1 and P2 (auditory) and P1, N1 and P2 (tactile). These results suggest an overlap in underlying neural systems when stimuli from different modalities are being processed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheyenne Mauriello ◽  
Eleonore Pham ◽  
Samika Kumar ◽  
Camille Piguet ◽  
Jean-Michel Aubry ◽  
...  

ADHD have been associated with social cognitive impairments across the lifespan, but no studies have specifically addressed the presence of abnormalities in eye-gaze processing in the adult brain. This study investigated the neural basis of eye-gaze perception in adults with ADHD using event-related potentials (ERP). Twenty-three ADHD and 23 controls performed a delayed face-matching task with neutral faces that had either direct or averted gaze. ERPs were classified using microstate analyses. ADHD and controls displayed similar P100 and N170 microstates. ADHD was associated with cluster abnormalities in the attention-sensitive P200 to direct gaze, and in the N250 related to facial recognition. For direct gaze, source localization revealed reduced activity in ADHD for the P200 in the left/midline cerebellum, as well as in a cingulate-occipital network at the N250. These results suggest brain impairments involving eye-gaze decoding in adults with ADHD, suggesting that neural deficits persist across the lifespan.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharif I. Kronemer ◽  
Mark Aksen ◽  
Julia Ding ◽  
Jun Hwan Ryu ◽  
Qilong Xin ◽  
...  

AbstractConsciousness is not explained by a single mechanism, rather it involves multiple specialized neural systems overlapping in space and time. We hypothesize that synergistic, large-scale subcortical and cortical attention and signal processing networks encode conscious experiences. To identify brain activity in conscious perception without overt report, we classified visual stimuli as perceived or not using eye measurements. Report-independent event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals both occurred at early times after stimuli. Direct recordings revealed a novel thalamic awareness potential linked to conscious visual perception based on report. fMRI showed thalamic and cortical detection, arousal, attentional salience, task-positive, and default mode networks were involved independent of overt report. These findings identify a specific sequence of neural mechanisms in human conscious visual perception.One-Sentence SummaryHuman conscious visual perception engages large-scale subcortical and cortical networks even without overt report.


2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 1452-1464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra L. Mills ◽  
Chantel Prat ◽  
Renate Zangl ◽  
Christine L. Stager ◽  
Helen J. Neville ◽  
...  

The ability to discriminate phonetically similar speech sounds is evident quite early in development. However, inexperienced word learners do not always use this information in processing word meanings [Stager & Werker (1997). Nature, 388, 381–382]. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine developmental changes from 14 to 20 months in brain activity important in processing phonetic detail in the context of meaningful words. ERPs were compared to three types of words: words whose meanings were known by the child (e.g., “bear”), nonsense words that differed by an initial phoneme (e.g., “gare”), and nonsense words that differed from the known words by more than one phoneme (e.g., “kobe”). These results supported the behavioral findings suggesting that inexperienced word learners do not use information about phonetic detail when processing word meanings. For the 14-month-olds, ERPs to known words (e.g., “bear”) differed from ERPs to phonetically dissimilar nonsense words (e.g., “kobe”), but did not differ from ERPs to phonetically similar nonsense words (e.g., “gare”), suggesting that known words and similar mispronunciations were processed as the same word. In contrast, for experienced word learners (i.e., 20-month-olds), ERPs to known words (e.g., “bear”) differed from those to both types of nonsense words (“gare” and “kobe”). Changes in the lateral distribution of ERP differences to known and unknown (nonce) words between 14 and 20 months replicated previous findings. The findings suggested that vocabulary development is an important factor in the organization of neural systems linked to processing phonetic detail within the context of word comprehension.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
KYLIE J. WHEATON ◽  
ANDREW PIPINGAS ◽  
RICHARD B. SILBERSTEIN ◽  
AINA PUCE

Monkey electrophysiological and human neuroimaging studies indicate the existence of specialized neural systems for the perception and execution of actions. To date, the dynamics of these neural systems in humans have not been well studied. Here, we investigated the spatial and temporal behavior of human neural responses elicited to viewing motion of the face, hand, and body. Scalp event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 20 participants viewing videotaped mouth (opening, closing), hand (closing, opening), and body stepping (forward, backward) movements. ERP peak differences within the movements of each body part were compared using topographical maps of voltage, voltage difference, and Student's t-test at ERP peak latencies. Predominantly temporoparietal negative ERPs occurred to motion of all body parts within 200 ms postmovement onset. Hand closure elicited a significantly greater negativity than opening, particularly in the left hemisphere. Vertex positive ERPs within 300 ms postmovement onset were elicited to hand and body motion. A significantly greater positivity occurred for the body stepping forward relative to stepping backward. The ERP topography was consistent with observed activation foci in human neuroimaging studies. Our data indicate that the neural activity of a system dedicated to the perception of high-level motion stimuli can rapidly differentiate between movements across and within body parts.


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