Applying Cultural Ergonomics/Human Factors to Safety Information Research

Cultural ergonomics/human factors (CE/HF) is an approach that considers situation- and trait-based variations among cultures. Several trait and environmental factors that vary by culture have been shown to influence risk perception, risk-taking behavior, and compliance as well as other processes and behaviors. When applying a CE/HF approach to safety information research, researchers should pay careful attention to the planning and implementation of research activities. This paper discusses methodologies, recruitment strategies, and issues to consider when designing research intended to yield cross-cultural application.

Graded Structure in Odour Categories: A Cross-Cultural Case Study

The existence of graded structure in fruit and flower odour categories and its stability in different cultures is examined. Groups of students from France, the United States, and Vietnam performed a typicality rating task, a similarity judgment task, a membership verification task, a recognition memory task, a familiarity rating task, and a free identification task using a set of 40 odorants (20 fruit odorants and 20 flower odorants). Overall, our results demonstrate that fruit and flower odour categories possess graded structure. Moreover, principal component analyses of the data revealed the implication of typicality in a variety of cognitive tasks where typical odours receive a preferential processing compared to atypical ones. Finally, our results suggest that typicality can be predicted to a certain extent by experiential knowledge but that other determinants play a role in odour category structure. Altogether, this study confirms that graded structure is a universal property of categories and suggests that universals and cultural specifics can both constrain the emergence of odour category structures.

Category Norms as a Function of Culture and Age: Comparisons of Item Responses to 105 Categories by American and Chinese Adults

Understanding how aging influences cognition across different cultures has been hindered by a lack of standardized, cross-referenced verbal stimuli. This study introduces a database of such item-level stimuli for both younger and older adults, in China and the United States, and makes 3 distinct contributions. First, the authors specify which item categories generalize across age and/or cultural groups, rigorously quantifying differences among them. Second, they introduce novel, powerful methods to measure between-group differences in freely generated ranked data, the rank-ordered logit model and Hellinger Affinity. Finally, a broad archive of tested, cross-linguistic stimuli is now freely available to researchers: data, similarity measures, and all stimulus materials for 105 categories and 4 culture-by-age groups, comprising over 10,000 fully translated unique item responses.