Influence of culture on visual working memory: evidence of a cultural response bias for remote Australian Indigenous children

Evidence for cross-cultural response biases is now relatively ubiquitous in psychological research, however the idea that cultural differences might influence neurocognitive performance remains relatively underexplored. We objectively measured different response strategies of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children using signal detection theory to examine whether the way they responded (measured as response bias) might affect their perceived visual working memory ability (measured as detection sensitivity). We conceptualised response bias as whether children responded more liberally or conservatively when determining whether they observed a change in temporally-presented change-detection stimuli. We present quantitative evidence that remote Indigenous children employ more conservative decision making strategies than non-Indigenous children when completing visual working memory tasks. Evidence presented here of cross-cultural differences in decision-making during cognitive performance highlights the importance of considering cross-cultural differences when conducting cognitive research, and suggests a need to evaluate whether such differences may affect task performance. This evidence also highlights the need to evaluate whether such differences may affect task performance in applied settings, for example within the domain of literacy acquisition.