Acculturation & Cognition

How does being exposed to new cultural perspectives/environments affect one's cognitive strategies? What are its mechanisms? 

See our paper that showed acculturation is associated with change in memory strategies over a period of 16 months, even in a group where most or all of their friends were of the same cultural background. I've shown this both behaviorally and neurally within a Chinese group in the United States, including examining both between and within-person change as part of this. My focus is on the within-person and within-culture change and variation, but there are individual differences.

Cognitive Training

We see acquiring culture as repeated training in cognitive strategies. We focus on that cognitive training as the mechanism for cultural acquisition (e.g., acculturation). 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, and how earlier strategies might impact those that come later. I focus on doing so with Americans.

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

Variation Across the United States Cognitively

One way we are accomplishing this is through examining within-group variation. We aim to explore similar questions to this, examining how relevant aspects of culture vary (e.g., region, urbanicity/rurality, socioeconomic status) and relate to cognitive outcomes. I am also interested in measures related to globalization, industrialization, and acculturation, including but not limited to relocation. This intersects well with my other line of research with a focus on within-culture, rather than within-person variation. 

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 aims to establish a variety of interdependence within the global West. 

The United States (and the West globally) has been 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 and working patterns at a different level of analysis in building upon existing labor-intensity theory, strong kinship ties in building upon existing social orientation theory, 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. This cultural group shares many characteristics with others outside of the region and holds variation within it, however I am working towards identifying what is most impactful for this cultural group in terms of cognitive processing and culture. This includes the use of both anthropological methods (e.g., explicit and implicit measures, semi-structured interviewing, card-sorting, free listing, etc.) and cognitive neuroscience methods (e.g., explicit and implicit measures, EEG, certain existing and novel cognitive tasks and methodologies).

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 theory and methods from cultural and social psychology (e.g., archival analysis), 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.