Functional connectome fingerprint of holistic-analytic cultural style

Abstract

Although research in the field of cultural psychology and cultural neuroscience has revealed that culture is an important factor related to the human behaviors and neural activities in various tasks, it remains unclear how different brain regions organize together to construct a topological network for the representation of individual's cultural tendency. In this study, we examined the hypothesis that resting-state brain network properties can reflect individual's cultural background or tendency. By combining the methods of resting-state magnetic resonance imaging and graph theoretical analysis, significant cultural differences between participants from Eastern and Western cultures were found in the degree and global efficiency of regions mainly within the default mode network and subcortical network. Furthermore, the holistic-analytic thinking style, as a cultural value, provided a partial explanation for the cultural differences on various nodal metrics. Validation analyses further confirmed that these network properties effectively predicted the tendency of holistic-analytic cultural style within a group (r = 0.23) and accurately classified cultural groups (65%). The current study establishes a neural connectome representation of holistic-analytic cultural style including the topological brain network properties of regions in the default mode network, the basal ganglia and amygdala, which enable accurate cultural group membership classification.