Although no disparity in the general factor was found, Demetriou et al. (in press) uncovered large differences in visuo/spatial abilities between their Chinese and Greek samples.
Not very exciting in itself. But what I did find interesting was their perferred explanation, which I haven’t seen (or don’t recall having seen) before.
In the present case, the assumption would be that the experience of learning the Chinese logographic system generates a special inter-wiring in the brain that supports and facilitates visuo/spatial processing. Indeed, recent neuroimaging studies show that thinking about Chinese (Tan et al., 2001) or Kanji characters (Bihan, Klein, & Dohi, 2002), which is the Japanese system of writing that is very similar to Chinese, activates many more brain areas in both the right and the left hemispheres than when thinking about phonetic characters. Interestingly, thinking about Chinese logographs activates an area in the frontal cortex (Tan et al., 2001) that is involved in executive control and the integration of different processing components (Goldberg, 2002). This is in line with the finding of the present study that Chinese excel in interference control. It is worthwhile to suppose that this kind of differentiation, even if local and domain-specific at the beginning, may eventually be reflected into more general intellectual characteristics, such as the overall thinking styles that may characterize different cultural groups. For instance, visuo/spatial processing, which is known to have a wholistic style of representation and processing (Corballis, 2003 and Hoffman, 1998), being a powerful mode of thinking in Chinese and other eastern cultures which share similar logographic systems, may be responsible, to some extent, for the qualitative differences between thinking in the east as compared to the west, mentioned in the introduction (Nisbett, 2003).
Of course, they could not rule out heritable differences. North Asians could be culturally capitalizing on their already-present abilities in the form on complex written scripts.
Reference:
Demetriou, A. et al. In press. The architecture, dynamics, and development of mental processing: Greek, Chinese, or Universal? Intelligence.
Posted by God Fearing Atheist at 08:52 PM