Cultural variations in memory disruption : the part-list cuing impairment in Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States

Abstract

This research examines the cultural generalizability of a well-established memory phenomenon, the part-list cuing impairment, in which people who receive a subset of a studied list as hints recall fewer items than those who do not. Extensive research conducted in North America and Europe has documented this impairment. Our investigation focused on competing hypotheses about possible cultural differences in this impairment. The first hypothesis was that the part-list cue impairment in recall is a culturally universal memory phenomenon (i.e., it is not modulated by culture). The second hypothesis focused on possible differences in part-list cuing impairment rooted in cultural differences in analytic versus holistic processing styles. Contrary to both hypotheses, our results indicated that the part-list cuing impairment was similarly strong in the United States and Taiwan, cultures that can both be considered relatively less multicultural. In contrast, the part-list cuing impairment was weaker among ethnic Chinese participants in Singapore, a culture that can be considered relatively more multicultural. The highly influential analytic-holistic cognition distinction, which would predict that ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Taiwan would be similar to each other but different from Americans, cannot account for these findings. Instead, we consider possible alternative explanations, such as the idea that multiculturalism might shape basic memory processes that are assumed to be culturally universal. Overall, this research highlights the importance of exploring psychological phenomena in cross-cultural psychology beyond two-culture comparisons and beyond the dominant paradigms for explaining East-West differences in cognition.