Over the past nearly 35 years, there has been sporadic interest in what has commonly come to be known as the Proust phenomenon, whereby autobiographical memories are retrieved and experienced differently when evoked by odors as compared with other types of cues, such as words, images or sounds. The purpose of this review is threefold. First, we provide a detailed analysis of the methods used to investigate Proust effects. Second, we review and analyze the various findings from the literature and determine what we feel to be the most important and stable findings. Third, we provide a series of previously postulated and new hypotheses that attempt to account for the various findings. Given the early stage of research, the current review aims to provide a measure of organization to the field, as well serve as a guide for how future investigations may address the topic. We conclude with the recommendation that research in this area shift its focus from establishing the phenomenon towards explaining its causes.
Response priming refers to the finding that a prime preceding a target influences the response to the target. With German subjects, horizontally moving dots as primes, and static arrows as targets, there are typically faster responses to compatible (i.e., prime and target are associated with the same response) as compared to incompatible targets (i.e., positive compatibility effect, PCE) with short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In contrast, with longer SOAs, subjects respond faster to incompatible as compared to compatible targets (i.e., negative compatibility effect, NCE). In the present study, we extended the evidence by adding vertically oriented materials. Furthermore, we tested subjects from Malaysia and Japan, where the vertical orientation is more present in daily life, and compared them to German subjects to investigate whether the amount of experience with one orientation influences the compatibility effects on this orientation. Overall, we found pronounced PCEs in the short SOA (i.e., 150 ms) but only reduced PCEs in the longer SOAs (i.e., 350, 550, and 750 ms) across all countries and orientations. There were no differences between the German and Malaysian samples, but the Japanese sample showed larger PCEs in the longer SOAs compared to both other samples. Furthermore, we found larger PCEs for horizontal than vertical materials in the short SOA and larger PCEs for vertical than horizontal materials in the longer SOAs. We discuss our findings in light of theories and findings on compatibility effects as well as attentional mechanisms.
Previous research has suggested that culture influences perception and attention. These studies have typically involved comparisons of Westerners with East Asians, motivated by assumed differences in the cultures' self-concept or position on the individualism-collectivism spectrum. However, other potentially important sources of cultural variance have been neglected, such as differences in traffic directionality shaped by the urban spatial environment (i.e., left-hand vs. right-hand traffic). Thus, existing research may potentially place too much emphasis on self-concepts or the individualism-collectivism dimension in explaining observed cultural differences in cognition. The present study investigated spatial cognition using a Simon task and tested participants from four nations (Australia, China, Germany, and Malaysia) that differ in both cultural orientation (collectivistic vs. individualistic) and traffic directionality (left-hand vs. right-hand traffic). The task used two possible reference frames underlying the Simon effect: a body-centered one based on global stimulus position relative to the screen's center versus an object-centered one based on local stimulus position relative to a context object. As expected, all groups showed a reliable Simon effect for both spatial reference frames. However, the global Simon effect was larger in participants from countries with left-hand traffic. In contrast, the local Simon effect was modulated by differences in cultural orientation, with larger effects in participants from collectivistic cultures. This pattern suggests that both sources of cultural variation, viz. cultural orientation and traffic directionality, contribute to differences in spatial cognition in distinct ways.
The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances in which to investigate collective memory and future simulations of events reported during the onset of a potentially historic event. Between early April and late June 2020, we asked over 4,000 individuals from 15 countries across four continents to report on remarkable (a) national and (b) global events that (i) had happened since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, and (ii) they expected to happen in the future. Whereas themes of infections, lockdown, and politics dominated global and national past events in most countries, themes of economy, a second wave, and lockdown dominated future events. The themes and phenomenological characteristics of the events differed based on contextual group factors. First, across all conditions, the event themes differed to a small yet significant degree depending on the severity of the pandemic and stringency of governmental response at the national level. Second, participants reported national events as less negative and more vivid than global events, and group differences in emotional valence were largest for future events. This research demonstrates that even during the early stages of the pandemic, themes relating to its onset and course were shared across many countries, thus providing preliminary evidence for the emergence of collective memories of this event as it was occurring. Current findings provide a profile of past and future collective events from the early stages of the ongoing pandemic, and factors accounting for the consistencies and differences in event representations across 15 countries are discussed.