Cultural differences in memory for faces and associated perceptual versus social contexts

The current study investigates cultural differences in memory for faces and their associated contexts between East Asian and Western cultures. Thirty-six Caucasian Canadian (age range = 17 - 30, M = 21.00, SD = 3.94) and 35 native Chinese (age range = 19 – 27, M = 22.06, SD = 2.33) young adults participated in the study. At encoding, participants subjectively rated face stimuli according to the cue words within social (“FRIENDLY” vs. “SUCCESS”) and perceptual (“HEIGHT” vs. “WEIGHT”) contexts. At test, participants performed a context recognition task to identify whether the test stimulus was a new face or an old face associated with a specific context cue word. Results did not show any cultural difference in memory. However, both cultures showed better recognition in the social context than in the perceptual context condition. In addition, the other race effect was observed in context memory for Canadian, but not Chinese participants.