Neural response to cultural contexts and preferential decision-making task : an fMRI study

• Main Author: Sim, Jeremy Wei Khang
• Other Authors: Gianluca Esposito
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77617
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Culture is multifaceted, and there is growing evidence that an individual can have multiple cultural identities. Multiculturalism led to the emergence of an enlarged, common shared cultural identity, on top of the existing ethnic identity. This paper examines if different cultural identities exist on the basis of differing neural response, and their effect on preferential decision making. The study was carried out using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. Three types of cultural context primes were visually presented - (1) Cultural, (2) Ethnic in-group, and (3) Ethnic out-group primes. After each prime, participants went through a preferential decision-making task between a novel and familiar common object. No difference in behavioural results of the preferential decision-making task across the contexts conditions was observed. Similarly, there was no difference in neural response to situations when either novel or familiar objects were chosen. Cultural contexts had an effect on neural activation when the decision-making task was unaccounted for. Overall, ethnic in-group and out-group contexts elicited neural responses from areas associated with group membership such as out-group bias. The common shared culture context, which associates with the proposed idea of an enlarged in-group, generally elicited greater activation in brain regions associated with visual attention and uncertainty. Pairwise comparison of experimental conditions demonstrated that contextual priming led to a dynamic neural response across the familiar-novel object decision-making task. This suggests that contextual primes have modulating influence on the process of deciding a preferred object. Overall, the concept that different cultural identities exists within a multicultural society is supported. Results suggest that individuals could be associated different identities, which resulted in different neural responses. The study contributes to the field of consumer neuroscience by investigating how priming different cultural contexts can elicit different cognitive processes during a decision-making task that involved simple familiar-novel designs of common objects.