The Impact Of Multicultural Experience On Information Processing

Multicultural experience refers to the direct or indirect experience which isobtained from the members of different cultures or cultural elements ofcommunication and collision. Previous researches have shown that multiculturalexperience individuals processed information differently to single culture experienceindividuals in attention control, bicultural identity integration, stereotype andcreativity etc. But so far, few researches explore the processing information styles ofmulticultural experience. The basic styles of processing information include globalprocessing and local processing. Both of them have important influence oninformation processing. Studies have shown that multicultural experience isconducive to extending the conceptual category and creative problem solving.However, global processing style can help to upper concept in a semantic network andit is also conducive to extending the conceptual category and creative problem solving.Accordingly, whether multicultural experience tends to use global processing style toprocess information?The present study adopts classic culture paradigm and use similar and dissimilartask, person-memory task and creative problem solving task to further explore thestyle of multicultural experience processing information. Experiment1shows thatmulticultural experience is conductive to looking for similarities between things.Experiment2discoveries that multicultural experience can use two types ofinformation which is consistent and inconsistent with stereotype. Experiment3discoveries that multicultural experience has a better performance in creative problemsolving task-Duncker’s candle problem. These results suggest that multiculturalexperience is conducive to global processing. The main findings of this study aremulticultural experience tends to global processing style, suggesting that multiculturalexperience individuals integrate information according to its global characteristics;Global processing style is an important reason of multicultural experience having abetter performance in creative problem solving task than single experience.