Abstract
Culture can impact the way in which an individual perceives the world around him or her. While definitions of culture vary widely between and within the varying social sciences, a cross-disciplinary definition might encompass culture as the values, ideas, and systems of belief that are shared amongst a network of interacting individuals who form a societal structure from which persons derive a sense of identification and interpret the world around them (Bruner, 1990; D’Andrade, 1984; DiMaggio, 1997; Geertz, 1973; Kashima, Woolcock, & Kashima, 2000; Sperber, 1996). Thus, culture can influence cognition related to social, emotional, and self-relevant processes. These processes correspondingly can shape the construction of culture, through the effects of personally held values and ideas as well as through interactions with others. A host of research indicates that Westerners tend to focus on objects, categories, and the self as an independent entity, whereas Easterners attend more to contexts, functional relationships, and group-relevant information. The lens imparted by one’s culture can direct attention, filtering which aspects of one’s environment are noted and encoded into memory (Gutchess & Indeck, 2009). In terms of memory retrieval, the cultural lens can shape which details are stored in memory and which cues serve as effective elicitors of information from memory.