Context Matters in Cross-Cultural Research: Different Change Detection Paradigm Stimuli Elicits Differential Response Bias Patterns for Australian Indigenous Children

This paper explores the influence of culture on the way we perceive and process our environment. Research presented here is part of a broader project that examined whether culture affects the development of cognitive processes underlying reading acquisition. For this project, 51 Indigenous Australian children and 58 non-Indigenous Australian children were tested on a battery of culturally-adapted cognitive tasks that measured oral working memory, visual working memory, phonological segmentation, and dorsal and ventral processing.

The current paper focuses on visual working memory processes, as measured using different change detection paradigms: one using color stimuli, and another using images of animals native to northern Australia. The aim of this research was to examine whether Indigenous peoples living in very remote regions of Australia, who maintain strong culture and language practices, as well as strong connections to their local environment, respond differently to non-natural versus natural stimuli. If culture influences fundamental neurocognitive processing we should observe different response patterns to various cognitive tasks across different cultural groups.

Preliminary analysis reveals that Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups showed similar response sensitivity and response bias patterns in that accuracy decreased as array size increased for both groups and both groups responded more conservatively as array size increased. However, the magnitude of response bias for the color stimuli was significantly greater for Indigenous children compared to non-Indigenous children. These results imply that Indigenous children had a more conservative approach when discriminating between non-natural colors than non-Indigenous children. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed.