The degree of individualism or collectivism in a culture has observable effects on cognitive processing. Participants from collectivist cultures are less able to identify a previously displayed object when presented with a novel background than participants from individualist cultures, interpreted as collectivist cultures more likely to process information field dependently. We tested explicitly whether collectivist or individualist cultures are more likely to bind foreground and background features and whether such binding is differentially affected for object-scene and action-scene combinations.
117 participants from the UK (individualist culture) and 121 from Malaysia (collectivist culture) viewed 40 action-scene or 40 object-scene pairs, and then completed a forced choice recognition task, where the presence or absence of the action/object and scene were systematically varied. The UK group more accurately recognised object-scene pairs than the Malaysian group, but there was no difference for action-scene pairs. The object-scene effect indicates that the Malaysian culture were less able to isolate foreground and background features for comparison with the original object-scene pair, but contrary to previous interpretations of cultural effects, this seemed to be due to greater binding of memory in the UK group.