We are interested in understanding the acquisition of culture itself cognitively.

There are currently two ongoing projects in the lab.

Malleability & Acquisition of Culture

Within-Person Variation

How do your cultural values change throughout your life?

How does that affect the way you think and remember?

Cultural Variation within the USA

Within-Culture Variation

How do cultural values differ between different regions of the United States?

How do approaches to cognitive tasks differ regionally?

Flexibility & Malleability of Culture Understood Cognitively

Acculturation / Immigration

How does being exposed to new cultural perspectives/environments affect one's cognitive strategies? How is this evidenced both behaviorally and in EEG/ERP signals longitudinally?

See our paper that showed acculturation is associated with change in memory strategies over a period of 16 months.

Training

We see acquiring culture as repeated training in behaviors, values, and cognition. Research shows our cultural backgrounds lead to cognitive biases and preferences for certain strategies in memory and perception. We are currently testing if it is possible to change these in the lab, expanding the strategies readily accessible to participants.

In particular, we aim to understand and manipulate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this process.

Moving Beyond East Versus West Comparisons of Cognition

Variation Across the United States

One way we are accomplishing this is through examining within-group variation. For example, how tightness-looseness varies throughout the United States and how that relates to individuals' attitudes and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic (paper here).

We aim to explore similar questions to this, examining how relevant aspects of culture vary (e.g., region, urbanicity/rurality, or socioeconomic status) and relate to cognitive outcomes.

Appalachian Culture & Cognition

Recently, cross-cultural researchers have begun identifying varieties of interdependence within the global East, for example in South Asia, however our work offers a variety of interdependence within the global West.

The United States is widely considered to be an independent (self-focused) culture, where uniqueness, a positive self-concept, and autonomy are highly valued. However, Appalachian culture consists of many qualities known to be associated with interdependence (e.g., labor-intensive forms of production like coal-mining and tobacco-farming, strong kinship ties, etc.).

This line of research is focused on identifying and characterizing a distinct form of interdependent social orientation and associated cognitive patterns within the United States among Appalachians.

Mixed Methods Approach : Cognitive & Cultural

We aim to not only identify cultural differences, but also to work towards a better understanding of how they emerge and how different levels of cognitive processing (attentional, perceptual, memory-related) might impact one another.

This involves research with a mixed methods, interdisciplinary approach, utilizing surveys and questionnaires from cultural and social psychology (e.g., tightness-looseness, acculturation orientation, independence-interdependence), theory and ethnographic methods from cognitive and cultural anthropology (e.g., pile sorts, interviewing, cultural consonance/consensus), and methods from cognitive neuroscience (e.g., ERP analysis, EEG time-frequency analysis).

In many cases cross-cultural differences and individual differences within one cultural group are not evident behaviorally but are evident neurally. This could be due to a number of factors, including the recruitment of different brain areas or different cognitive strategies to achieve the same level of cognitive task performance and the increased sensitivity of neural measures. See our book chapter (Gutchess & Gilliam, 2022) for some examples.