28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

tries to explain children’s cultures. The main goal of the paper is to discuss this conception of the
relations between culture and cognition, and to illustrate it with a study about the development of
Polynesian and French children’s spatial representations.
4062.2 Language-sensitive limitation in encoding and immediate memory, U. Lass, S. Yan,
Georg-August-Universitaet Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany
Human information processing is marked by limitations that may be seen as invariants, i.e., they
are considered to be universally valid. The characteristics of any given language, however, may
lead to the corresponding limitations becoming apparent in varying degrees of task performance.
Our experiments involving German and Chinese native speakers provide evidence for
language-sensitive limitation in the efficiency of encoding briefly presented items and in
immediate memory (memory span). These findings are neatly accommodated by current theories
on working memory and encoding of object features. Thus the cross-linguistic approach proves to
be a particularly suitable strategy for investigating the universal features of human information
processing.
4062.3 Culture, shared reality, motivation and cognition: The case of counterfactual reasoning
and regulatory focus, C.Y. Chiu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA
Consistent with previous research findings, in a study of Beijing Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese,
and European American undergraduates, we found that compared to European Americans, Chinese
are more likely to engage in subtractive counterfactual reasoning (or regret over action). As
expected from shared reality theory, cultural differences in counterfactual reasoning were
significantly related to participants’ representation of the self-regulatory norms in their own
culture, and not related to their own self-regulatory orientations. These findings will be discussed
in terms of their implications for conceptualizing the relationship of culture and cognition.
4062.4 Thinking, culture and world-view, D. Doerner 1 , S. Ramnarayan 2 , 1 Universitaet
Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany; 2 Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India
In our study we tried to find a short method to identify the "worldview" and the style of thinking.
Indian intellectuals were confronted with two tasks, to judge the truth of seven proverbs, and to
tell us what they could see on photos that showed persons in an unclear context. Not the slightest
symptoms of a typical "eastern" style (Nisbett et al., 2001) could be found. The individual's
worldview was a strong factor determining the reactions. A "scientific" hypothetical view of the
world produced argumentative comments to the proverb, and "open end" stories for the photos. A
strong religious background produced "moralizing" tendencies and very general statements.
Additional factors were intelligence and specific life experience.
4062.5 Identifying antecedent of cross-cultural differences in cognition, Y.H. Poortinga, F.J.R.
van der Vijver, S. Bouwers, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Psychometric analysis of ability tests suggests close similarities of cognitive structures across
cultures, but has been unable to account for quantitative differences in scores. On the other hand,
experimental evidence has helped to identify elements of context that explain differences in score
levels, but only for fairly simple tasks. In this paper we discuss strategies to deal with the
remaining gap in knowledge, including (i) approaches that seek to identify large cross-cultural
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