Moritz Köster 1, Anna Bánki 2, Daiki Yamasaki 3, Shoji Itakura 3,4, Stefanie Höhl 2 1 Freie Universität Berlin, Germany 2 University of Vienna, Faculty of Psychology, Austria 3 Kyoto University, Department of Psychology, Japan 4 Doshisha University, Center for Baby Science, Kizugawa, Japan
Human perception is profoundly shaped by culture. Yet, the ontogenetic origins of cultural impacts on human cognition, and the underlying developmental mechanisms, remain unknown. Here we show culture-specific visual perception styles in the brains of 11-month-olds, and that cultural differences may be grounded in fundamentally different social experiences that human infants make in the early social interaction with their caregivers. Specifically, we tracked the neural signatures of object and background in the electroencephalogram (EEG) using frequency tagging (i.e., visually flickering object and background at different driving frequencies) and reveal that infants from Vienna (a western culture) show a pronounced object signal, in contrast to infants from Kyoto (an eastern culture) showing an accentuated background signal. That culture-specific perceptual processes emerge this early may be explained by distinct social interaction experiences infants’ make between cultures. Mothers form Vienna pointed out object elements of a scene to their infants much more often than mothers from Kyoto, with direct consequences for infant neural processing of object versus background elements. This study shows that human visual cortical processes shaped by cultural learning from early infancy on and identifies early social interaction as a critical shaping mechanism.
