Previous research has revealed that people from Western cultures tend to remember more details of objects and events in autobiographical memory compared to people from Eastern cultures. The present experiments tested whether differences in pattern separation—the process by which new, but potentially similar, exemplars are discriminated from previously encountered exemplars—account for these cultural difference in object memory. In two experiments, we investigated the extent to which North Americans and East Asians differ in pattern separation and whether these effects are related to cultural values. We also examined the role of response bias. These results revealed it is unlikely that pattern separation is the sole mechanism underlying cross-cultural memory specificity differences, as broader memory mechanisms, such as differences in memory resolution for previously encoded items, could account for the differences observed between groups.

先前的研究表明，与东方文化的人相比，西方文化的人倾向于在自传记忆中记住更多的物体和事件的细节。目前的实验测试了模式分离的差异——新的但可能相似的样本与以前遇到的样本区分开来的过程——是否解释了对象记忆中的这些文化差异。在两个实验中，我们调查了北美人和东亚人在模式分离方面的差异程度，以及这些影响是否与文化价值观有关。我们还研究了反应偏差的作用。这些结果表明，模式分离不太可能是跨文化记忆特异性差异的唯一机制，因为更广泛的记忆机制，