One example of culture’s influence on brain function involves the use of the abacus in East Asian cultures. Giyoo Hatano, a Japanese developmental psychologist, hypothesized that abacus users relied on a mental representation of an abacus to solve arithmetic problems. In an fMRI study, Japanese participants, all of whom were familiar with the abacus, demonstrated increased activation in the parietal lobe. The magnitude of activation was positively correlated with the difficulty of the arithmetic problem. By contrast, individuals with no abacus experience tend to engage brain regions associated with linguistic processing when tasked with arithmetic problems (i.e. Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area). These findings support Hatano’s theory and illustrate the influence of culture on neuroplasticity.