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.

Cultural neuroscience and arithmetic processing

A significant example of cultural neuroplasticity involves the famous “taxi driver” study by Maguire et al. (2000). They used structural MRI to compare the brains of experienced London taxi drivers to controls who did not drive taxis. Taxi drivers had larger posterior hippocampi, but smaller anterior hippocampi, compared to controls. Posterior and anterior hippocampal volume was positively and negatively correlated, respectively, with time spent as a licensed taxi driver. These findings support the hypotheses that a) the posterior hippocampus is involved in spatial/navigational memory and b) environmental stimuli can essentially “reshape” the brain.

Cultural neuroscience and spatial navigation

Research in the emerging field of cultural neuroscience suggests that culture influences one's sensitivity and reactivity to his or her emotions. A majority of such research has focused on comparisons between Europe and North America ("West") and China and Japan ("East"). Broadly speaking, European American cultures value emotional expression, whereas East Asian cultures value emotional control. EEG studies across the two cultures found that both Asians and European Americans showed a strong LPP amplitude after viewing unpleasant pictures. When tasked with suppressing negative emotions, however, Asians showed significant reduction in LPP amplitude, while the same effect was much less pronounced in European Americans. These studies highlight the role of culture in emotional processing. Future directions might look into cultures beyond the traditional binary of "Western" and "Eastern" cultures.

Cultural neuroscience and emotional regulation

Cultural Neuroscience Library

Cultural neuroscience is an emerging field of research that joins social and biological sciences to explore the influences of culture on brain development. While cultural psychology historically has relied on observational studies and survey methods, neuroscience measures such as ERPs and fMRI enable researchers to study the underlying neural mechanisms responsible for observed behavioral differences across cultures.

Pomona College

The study of the physiological basis for cognition.

Cognitive Neuroscience

Gross potential changes in the electrical activity of the brain due to a sensory stimulus such as a flashing light. The location of recording, the type of stimulus, and the state of the subject are reflected in the properties of ERPs, such as the wave shape and the latency (i.e., time delay). 
With ERPs, researchers ask participants to do the same task over and over again and they average all the EEGs recorded during those repeated trials. The variation due to random firing averages out. ERP has become the favorite tool of neuroscientists studying moment-to-moment consequences of attention in the brain.

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an effective tool for analyzing brain functionality. It is capable of tracking the functional response of the brain through Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) contrast. Increased neuronal activity leads to local increase in energy and oxygen consumption. Essentially, the BOLD effect is a contrast caused by the relative decrease in the magnetic field irregularities due to relative increase in the oxyHb level contributed by the blood flowing in the brain region with increased activity.

Functional MRI

Kitayama, S., & Park, J. (2010). Cultural neuroscience of the self: Understanding the social grounding of the brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(2–3), 111–129. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq052

Cultural neuroscience of the self: Understanding the social grounding of the brain (2010)

Murata, A., Moser, J. S., & Kitayama, S. (2013). Culture shapes electrocortical responses during emotion suppression. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(5), 595–601. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss036

Culture shapes electrocortical responses during emotion suppression (2013)

Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8), 4398–4403. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.070039597

Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers (2000)

Myruski, S., Birk, S., Karasawa, M., Kamikubo, A., Kazama, M., Hirabayashi, H., & Dennis-Tiwary, T. (2019). Neural signatures of child cognitive emotion regulation are bolstered by parental social regulation in two cultures. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 14(9), 947–956. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsz070

Neural signatures of child cognitive emotion regulation are bolstered by parental social regulation in two cultures (2019)

- Levels of analysis
- Neurons
- Brain
- Learning and Memory
- Attention and Higher Cognition
- Language and Lateralization

Focuses of cognitive neuroscience

Cultural Neuroscience

Latency is the time delay between the initiation of a stimulus and the electrical stimulation detected as a result of that stimulus. When latency is short, exogenous factors such as the intensity of the stimulus are primarily responsible for the latency. Longer-latency components, on the other hand, are primarily attributable to information-processing tasks that take a longer amount of time, such as attention, decision-making, and planning, among others. 

Timing of Latency

During visual search tasks, the N2pc appears over visual cortex contralateral to the location in space to which subjects are attending. Through experimentation, it has been proven that the N2pc component is associated with covert orientation towards an object when it is the target, rather than the suppression of a response towards distracters.

N2pc Component

On valid trials, electrodes measuring the activity of the occipital cortex show substantial enhancement of the event-related-potential component called P1, a positive wave that occurs over auditory cortex about 70-100 ms after stimulus onset. At longer intervals between the cue and target, the visual P1 effect may actually be reduced as an electrophysiological manifestation of inhibition of return. For invalid trials, where attention is directed elsewhere, the visual P1  effect isn't evident at all. 

Posner: Visual P1 Effect

An interesting phenomenon regarding to event-related-potentials is noticeable during dichotic presentation. Overall, the ERP's for attended stimuli were larger in amplitude than when the same stimuli at the same ear were not being attended to. This N1 effect must have been caused by selective attention somehow acting on neural mechanisms to enhance processing of information from that ear. The prefix "N" refers to the negative voltage deflection of the event-related potential.

N1 Effect

This is another ERP , event-related-potential, finding based on the dichotic presentation studies. P3, a wave also called auditory P300, is believed to reflect higher-order cognitive processing of the stimulus (ie. semantic meaning of words, identification of the speaker, etc.). The P3 effect is an example of a late-selection effect of auditory attention. The prefix "P" refers to the positive voltage deflection of the event-related potential.

P3 Effect

The late positive potential (LPP) is a type of ERP that emerges during the processing of emotional stimuli, positive or negative, compared to more "neutral" stimuli. It is a positive-trending waveform that spikes around 200-300 ms after initial exposure to a stimulus.

Late Positive Potential (LPP)

- In BPD subjects, there was an increased size of largest connected component (LCC).
   - Increased size of LCC indicates a lower number of disconnected nodes in a functional network.
- In BPD subjects, there was increased small-worldness, clustering coefficients, and local efficiency.
   - Small-world systems have the ability for specialized processing to occur within densely interconnected groups of brain regions and also has the ability to combine specialized information from distributed brain regions.
   - Clustering coefficients are defined as the ratio of the number of existing links and the number of all possible links between the direct neighbors of the node.
   - Local efficiency measures how efficiently information is exchanged over the network.
- Increased clustering coefficients and local efficiency indicates greater network "cliquishness" (i.e., more clustered structure).
   - Increased cliquishness seen in limbic and paralimbic brain regions, including the amygdala.
     - Could explain vulnerability to the fast and extreme reaction to a negative stimulus, the emotion being difficult to regulate.
- BPD subjects suggest long-distance functional connections between regions associated with self-referential processes. 
- BPD subjects might also cause an increase in the number of connections to non-hub nodes and a decrease in the number of connections to hub nodes in functional brain networks.
   - An example of a hub node is the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), acting as a literal hub that contributes connections to other networks. 

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