Complexities of Cross-cultural Cognitive Research: Does Performance on Standardized Global Motion and Global form Tasks Accurately Measure Ventral and Dorsal Processing for Australian Indigenous Populations?

Research presented here is part of a broader project that examined whether culture and environment can affect development of the 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 poster reports specifically on performance on global motion and global form tasks. These tasks are often relied on to measure fundamental neurocognitive processes, such as dorsal and ventral visual processing. Scientific understanding of performance on global motion and global form tasks typically relies on data that was collected exclusively using WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations, under the premise that the fundamental visual processes they measure are universally generalizable. The applicability of these tasks for use with non-WEIRD populations, however, has not been extensively tested.

Preliminary results presented herein indicate no significant difference in dorsal and ventral visual processing for age-matched Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups. However, significant differences in performance on both global motion and global form processing were observed between a younger non-Indigenous group (M = 9.39, SD = 0.50) and an older Indigenous group (M = 12.44, SD = 0.68), with the Indigenous group performing significantly worse on both tasks than the younger non-Indigenous group. Possible explanations for these findings, including methodological issues encountered, are discussed. This research highlights some of the complexities of conducting cross-cultural research using standardized psychophysical tasks.