The Cultural Interface: The Role of Self

With the increasing use of communications technology across cultural boundaries, and within cultural boundaries, we see shifts taking place both within a culture about itself, and across cultures about each other. Yet in what way are the shifts distinct, if so, from those which occur in face-to-face interaction? Consider the following simple example of a change in addressing: A Japanese person who would normally when referring to a colleague address him/her with surname to the addressee, changes to first name referral when communicating via email in the c.c. section of the mail header, and in the message itself. Neither would normally address the other by first name. Yet in a meeting at another company, Japanese persons addressed themselves by first name and surname, and the non-Japanese person with the Japanese form of name and ‘san’. They were adapting a traditional form of respecting the non-company person to a non-Japanese person in this manner of elevating my address in relation to their own. The addressing was a mixture of English and Japanese. This is in contrast to the consistency of addressing in the email situation, which is also an act of politeness to the English speaker’s cultural norm.\ud Consider another example of a British subject being asked if they ever communicate differently with a non-British person in email. The reply is that it depends on the person’s competence in English. Yet in a face-to-face situation,\ud we would not necessarily judge someone’s competence in understanding our utterance by the level of their English, but by their ability to make sense of what we are saying in relation to the situation. A Japanese person in a face-to-face setting may be highly competent in communicating, yet in a video conference, finds that due to poor quality of communication channels, he misunderstands and that the emphasis is placed on ‘competence’ in language as being equivalent to competence in communication

Crossmodal congruency effect scores decrease with repeat test exposure

The incorporation of feedback into a person’s body schema is well established. The crossmodal congruency task (CCT) is used to objectively quantify incorporation without being susceptible to experimenter biases. This visual-tactile interference task is used to calculate the crossmodal congruency effect (CCE) score as a difference in response time between incongruent and congruent trials. Here we show that this metric is susceptible to a learning effect that causes attenuation of the CCE score due to repeated task exposure sessions. We demonstrate that this learning effect is persistent, even after a 6 month hiatus in testing. Two mitigation strategies are proposed: 1. Only use CCE scores that are taken after learning has stabilized, or 2. Use a modified CCT protocol that decreases the task exposure time. We show that the modified and shortened CCT protocol, which may be required to meet time or logistical constraints in laboratory or clinical settings, reduced the impact of the learning effect on CCT results. Importantly, the CCE scores from the modified protocol were not significantly more variable than results obtained with the original protocol. This study highlights the importance of considering exposure time to the CCT when designing experiments and suggests two mitigation strategies to improve the utility of this psychophysical assessment

Commentary on "The Perception and Cognition of Time in Balinese Music" by Andrew Clay McGraw

We review the paper by Andrew Clay McGraw, noting that it represents an interesting and valuable contribution to the study of music in cognition in its informed exploration of non-western musical perceptions. We raise a number of concerns about the methods used, and make suggestions as to how the issues that were empirically addressed in the paper might have been tackled in ways that would have enhanced the interpretability of its findings