Are Asians forgetful? Perception, retention, and recallin episodic remembering

摘要

Cross-cultural studies have shown that Asians exhibit less accessibility to episodic memo-ries than Euro-Americans. This difference is often attributed to differential cognitive andsocial influences on memory retention, although there have been no empirical data con-cerning the underlying mechanism. Three studies were conducted to examine encodingand retention processes that may underlie the cultural difference in episodic recall. WhileAsians recalled fewer personal event episodes than Euro-Americans across different reten-tion intervals, the two groups showed similar forgetting functions over time (Study 1).Asians also recalled fewer episodes of fictional events than Euro-Americans when theretention interval was kept to a minimum (Study 2). Finally, Asians perceived fewer dis-crete episodes than Euro-Americans when reading events in a narrative text (Study 3). Col-lectively, these findings suggest that the cultural difference in episodic recall may not be amere consequence of memory retention but culture-specific perceptual processing andencoding. They have great theoretical, developmental, and clinical relevance.