更新日:2013/06/13
Culture and Attention: Implications for Developmental Research
Takahiko Masuda, University of Alberta, Canada
Abstract:
Issues of ethnicity and culture are some of the most controversial topics in the field of social science and humanities in the 21st century. Previously, psychologists have investigated the presumably universal aspects of psychological mechanisms and have paid little attention to the socio-cultural contexts in which these mechanisms take place. In the last three decades, however, cultural psychologists have investigated systematic cultural variations in psychological processes. These findings suggest that culture and human psychology mutually influence each other. In this talk, I will introduce cultural variation in attention and memory within the frameworks of holistic vs. analytic thought (Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003), and of “cultural products”—public, shared, tangible representations of culture available in a given society (Morling & Lamoreaux, 2008). I will begin by introducing studies which examined cultural variations in attention and memory (e.g. Masuda & Nisbett, 2001), and in aesthetic expression and design (Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan, & Nisbett, 2008; Wang, Masuda, Ito, & Rashid, 2012). I will then report recent findings of two developmental studies which investigated (1) when cultural variation in aesthetic expressions emerges and (2) how much caregivers’ patterns of narratives influence children’s development of culturally unique narratives (Senzaki & Masuda, 2013; Senzaki, Masuda, & Ishii, 2013). Implications will be discussed in relation to the development of culturally unique perspectives.
