The aging brain reflects cultural differences in the way that it processes visual information. This study published in the May 2007 issue of the journal Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience. This paper and another published by the same group in 2006 are the first to demonstrate that culture can alter the brain’s perceptive mechanisms.
“These are the first studies to show that culture is sculpting the brain,” said University of Illinois's Denise Park, principal investigator on the study. “The effect is seen not so much in structural changes, but at the level of perception.”
The Americans showed more activity in brain regions associated with object processing than the East Asians, whose brains showed more activity in areas involved in processing background information.
Labels: aging brain, culture and brain aging, sculpting the brain
