Is Perceptual Priming Affected by Culture? A Study With German Middle-Class and Cameroonian Nso Farmer Children

ABSTRACT

The authors explored priming in children from different cultural environments with the aim to provide further evidence for the robustness of the priming effect. Perceptual priming was assessed by a picture fragment completion task in 3-year-old German middle-class and Cameroonian Nso farmer children. As expected, 3-year-olds from both highly diverging cultural contexts under study showed a priming effect, and, moreover, the effect was of comparable size in both cultural contexts. Hence, the children profited similarly from priming, which was supported by the nonsignificant interaction between cultural background and identification performance as well as the analysis of absolute difference scores. However, a culture-specific difference regarding the level of picture identification was found in that German middle-class children identified target as well as control pictures with less perceptual information than children in the Nso sample. Explanations for the cross-cultural demonstration of the priming effect as well as for the culturally diverging levels on which priming occurs are discussed.

Keywords:

• implicit memory
• perceptual priming
• cross-cultural memory processes
• young children

Notes

¹All research has been realized in accordance with the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and the Code of Conduct of the American Psychological Association.

²Using relative difference scores as suggested by Snodgrass (1989) revealed similar results.