Grant: China-Canada Joint Health Research Initiative

Memory binding (i.e., the ability to learn and remember new associations, such as the association between a name and a face) is known to decline with aging, and this "binding deficit" of older adults is considered to be a major contributor to age-related memory decline (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). Cross-cultural research has shown that East Asians pay differentially more attention to contextual and relational information, whereas North Americans and Europeans are inclined to process context-independent features and categorical information (Park & Gutchess, 2006). This raises a possibility that East Asians may be superior at binding contextual or relational information whereas Westerners may be better at binding categorical information together. If applying a culture-specific binding strategy is resource-demanding, the culture differences may diminish with aging because the strategy use will be increasingly limited by the universal neurobiological decline in older adults (Park, Nisbett, & Hedden, 1999). However, these hypotheses have not been tested to date. The proposed project will investigate the cultural effects on memory binding and its age-related changes through a comparison of younger versus older adults from Chinese Eastern and Canadian Western cultures. The general objective is two-fold: 1) to test the hypothesis that the behavioural and neural measures of memory binding and its age-related changes are sensitive to cultural differences (Phase I); and 2) building on the insights from Phase I, to develop a memory training program for older adults that capitalizes on the binding strategies preferred in both cultures (Phase II). The proposed research will shed light on the relative contributions of biological and cultural influences to cognitive aging, an issue of growing scientific and societal significance. The research will also make important headway in the development of culturally appropriate intervention programs to minimize age-related cognitive decline.