Jiawei Xu, Soren Wainio-Theberge, Annemarie Wolff, Pengmin Qin, Yihui Zhang, Xuan She, Yingying Wang, Angelika Wolman, David Smith, Julia Ignaszewski, Joelle Choueiry, Verner Knott, Andrea Scalabrini, Georg Northoff
Environmental factors, such as culture, are known to shape individual variation in brain activity including spontaneous activity, but less is known about their population-level effects. Eastern and Western cultures differ strongly in their cultural norms about relationships between individuals. For example, the collectivism, interdependence and tightness of Eastern cultures relative to the individualism, independence and looseness of Western cultures, promote interpersonal connectedness and coordination. Do such cultural contexts therefore influence the group-level variability of their cultural members' spontaneous brain activity? Using novel methods adapted from studies of inter-subject neural synchrony, we compare the group-level variability of resting state EEG dynamics in Chinese and Canadian samples...
November 1, 2023: Social Neuroscience