{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.057545731707317076, 'fraction_numerical': 0.03353658536585366, 'mean_word_length': 5.310096153846154, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
How to Identify Mechanisms of Cultural Influences on Human Brain Functions

A key goal of cultural neuroscience research is to identify causal effects of culture on functional organization of the human brain. An early approach to this goal employed transcultural neuroimaging (Han & Northoff, 2008; Han et al., 2013) that compared brain activities involved in a specific cognitive or emotional task in two cultural groups. This line of research has shown ample evidence for differences between individuals from two cultural groups in neural correlates of visual perception (Goh et al., 2007; Goh et al., 2010; Gutchess, Welsh, Boduroglu, & Park, 2006; Jenkins, Yang, Goh, Hong, & Park, 2010), visual attention (Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Lewis, Goto, & Kong, 2008), causal attribution (Han, Mao, Qin, Friederici, & Ge, 2011), semantic processing (Gutchess, Hedden, Ketay, Aron, & Gabrieli, 2010), musical processing (Nan, Knösche, & Friederici, 2006; Nan, Knösche, Zysset, & Friederici, 2008), mental calculation (Tang et al., 2006), recognition of one’s own face (Sui, Liu, & Han, 2009), self-referential processing of personality traits (Han et al., 2010; Han et al., 2008; Ma et al., 2013; Zhu, Zhang, Fan, & Han, 2007), perception of bodily expression (Freeman, Rule, Adams, & Ambady, 2009), mental state reasoning (Adams et al., 2009; Kobayashi, Glover, & Temple, 2006), and empathy (de Greck et al., 2012). Chiao et al. (this issue) also give examples of their own transcultural neuroimaging studies that examined cultural influences on human brain functions. Although these transcultural neuroimaging studies show evidence for cultural group difference in brain activity and have contributed greatly to the development of cultural neuroscience, the findings reported in these studies also raise important questions. For example, Do group differences in brain activity necessarily reflect cultural influences? How can we reveal a mechanism of cultural influences on human brain activity in transcultural neuroimaging studies? Can we identify a causal relationship between culture and brain functions? These questions are not discussed extensively in Chiao et al.’s (this issue) article. In this commentary, I first give an example that group differences in brain activity may not be necessarily attributed to cultural effects. I then discuss, by giving an example, what current cultural neuroscience research can do to uncover mechanisms of cultural group difference in human brain functions. Finally, I discuss an approach to the understanding of a causal link between culture and brain functions.