| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 認知與神經科學研究所 === 102 === Culture is a phenomenal offspring of traditions and time passed down from generation to generation and plays an important role in enabling people to adapt to their environment and live prosperously. These cultural effects vary across different populations. Many studies have shown that culture effects shift the way people perceive the world (e.g. Masuda &; Nisbett, 2001; Norenzayen et al., 2002; Kitayama et al., 2003) and the way they ponder or make inference related to the things that surround them. The present thesis attempts to investigate the effects of cultural differences making use of neuroscientific tools such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to allow us to have a better interpretation of the effects of culture. Since the effects of culture are too great and too diverse to interpret with just one study, three experimental studies of different aspects contributing to culture effects were conducted to examine the phenomenon. For the first study, a 3 by 2 experimental design with a task adapted from Kitayama et al. 2003 to look at absolute and relative perception and processing, the frame line task, was investigated with tDCS applied to the left inferior parietal lobule. This area has been implicated in cultural differences and a culturally related but non-task preference casual effect was found. The second study aimed to investigate facial appearances and prediction of outcomes of election through various cues and found culturally different patterns of correlation. In the third study, perspective taking and theory of mind were examined with culture effects by comparing patterns of performance with those from previous studies and found a consistent result. From these three studies, the thesis shed some light in the field of culture neuroscience and opens up questions for future studies to follow.
Keywords: culture difference, tDCS, theory of mind, election prediction
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