Reasoning differences between Asians and Westerners are quite deep
 

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2121449&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

(See also, Who Invented (almost) Everything, How About You People Contribute a Little too? and Playing Catch Up )

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Chinese, English Speakers Vary at Math

A Study Shows Chinese and English Speakers Handle Math With Different Part of Brain

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID AP Science Writer
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Things add up differently for native English speakers compared with people who learned Chinese as a first language.

Simple arithmetic was easily done by both groups, but they used different parts of the brain, a new study shows.

Researchers used brain imaging to see which parts of the brain were active while people did simple addition problems, such as 3 plus 4 equals 7. All participants were working with Arabic numerals which are used in both cultures.

Both groups engaged a portion of the brain called the inferior parietal cortex, which is involved in quantity representation and reading.

But native English speakers also showed activity in a language processing area of the brain, while native Chinese speakers used a brain region involved in the processing of visual information, according to the report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The difference "may mean that Chinese speakers perform problems in a different manner than do English speakers," said lead author Yiyuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in Dalian, China.

"In part that might represent the difference in language. It could be that the difference in language encourages different styles of computation and this may be enhanced by different methods of learning to deal with numbers," Tang said in an interview via e-mail.

"We believe language plays a role in the calculation," Tang said. But Tang added that cultural factors may also play a part, such as math learning strategies and school training.

These cultural differences using numbers may help scientists develop better strategies for doing calculations, Tang explained: "It could well turn out that certain strategies may be optimal, even when used with a different type of language."

Richard E. Nisbett, co-director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan, said "the work is important because it tells us something about the particular pathways in the brain that underlie some of the differences between Asians and Westerners in thought patterns."

"Ultimately this kind of work will show us when these pathways begin to diverge and how it may be possible to teach Westerners some of the advantages of Asian thought and Asians some of the advantages of Western thought," said Nisbett, who was not part of the research team.

Nisbett last year reported on differences in the way Asians and North Americans view pictures. He tracked eye movements and determined that, when shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene.

"They literally are seeing the world differently," he said.

The new work extends his findings, Nisbett said, "in that it indicates that the reasoning differences that we find between Asians and Westerners are really quite deep."

The new study was funded by the National Science Foundation of China and the McKnight Research Program.

On the Net:

PNAS: http://www.pnas.org

Not terribly surprising.

Eastern thought, hmm, how can I make this better, and more efficiently

Western thought, hmm, how can I make this more quickly to give me more time to loaf.

What I wonder about all of this is do the Chinese still use the abacus? The Japanese still use the abacus. If the Chinese use the abacus the way the Japanese do then it's no wonder they use the part of the cortex that deals with the processing of visual info.

I wish we taught the abacus here in the states more. It's an amazing tool for math. I believe it would make people that have a knack for math better and would make people that have a hard time with math much, much better at math.

I think the language is a big part of this. Using pictograms and tones for written and spoken language is very different from the use of individual letters and using pitch for intonation rather than meaning.

Man, that tonal language thing is something else. Do the Orientals also use foot pedals for input when using the computer? I don't speak French either but sometimes I'll stop at the French FM station for a few minutes just to listen to the language because it sounds so pleasant.

psst! That report was led by an Asian...could be he's leading y'all down the wrong path LOL!!!

Interesting...I always visualized simple math..more to do with photographic memory me thinks. Personally, I don't want to waste good brain processing time on simple stuff...so I just take a mental snap shot. LOL...efficient Steve? :D

I don't know about the Chinese, but there's a thing built into XP that allows anyone to type in Japanese with a regular keyboard. I'm in the process of trying to learn Japanese, so I've installed it. Pretty darn cool, but I don't have it down yet.

The Japanese have 2 "alphabets" and a third set of symbols borrowed from the Chinese. The two alphabets, katakana and hiragana, have 46 basic characters each and are the same sounds but used for different things. The symbols borrowed from China are for sounds, words, phrases, ideas, etc... and the Japanese govt says that the avg adult should know about 2000 for daily life, reading the newspaper, etc...

So I guess that means about 2100 characters in all.

The teaching of "kanji" characters to western adults uses a few tricks of it's own.. First of all - no matter how complicated the character - it is only made up of a few dozen component elements. They are not pictographs (but the component elements did evolve from them). The components can be used in a near infinite number of characters. The average Japanese adult knows more than the 2100 and to master Chinese, you need double that..