A THREE-LEVEL APPROACH TO UNDERSTAND CULTURAL VARIABILITY AND THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN ATTENTION

抄録

Attention plays a crucial role in cognition and behavior. To explain the cultural variability of attention, we postulated a general hypothesis of cultural adaptation, which assumes that the attentional mechanism co-evolves with objects in our environment. We employed a three-level approach composed of hypothesis-driven experiments, a large-scale database platform gathering results from various parts of the world (“Kokoro World Map”), and corpus-based analyses. This article reports on an attempt to apply this approach using visual search and the Stroop effect as examples. In visual search task, we began with hypothesis-driven experiments on search asymmetry, and is currently expanding to the construction of large-scale databases using online experiments and an ontology database. In the Stroop task, we constructed ontology and corpus-based analyses to formulate concrete hypotheses about the cultural evolution of cognitive control, which were examined by online and laboratory experiments. From these multi-level approaches, we also try to integrate the findings of cognitive science and those of archaeology and anthropology.