Past research has provided evidence for cultural differences in episodic memory when comparing European American and East Asian samples. However, cultural cognitive neuroscience has become over-dependent on European American vs. East Asian samples, which has left very little research into groups outside of this dichotomy. The aim of this dissertation was to address the need of more diverse samples in cultural cognitive neuroscience and to address the lack of research on Latinx biculturals. In this dissertation I explored how language could serve as a priming method to activate specific cultural systems, how bicultural Latinxs may switch cultural frames through language priming, and how priming of cultural systems affects their perception and recognition memory for certain visual information. The present study was designed to include a specific technique to investigate the potential cross-modal effect of cultural priming through language on visual cognition in bicultural and bilingual Latinxs. Results suggest that language did prime bicultural Latinxs to perform differently in a behavioral task, where images encoded in Spanish were more likely to be identified as incorrect and images encoded in English were more likely to be identified as correct. Additionally, we found that Cultural Blendedness directly predicted recognition accuracy, where higher identification …

Time perception is a fundamental aspect of consciousness related to mental health. One cognitive state related to time perception is mind wandering (MW), defined as having thoughts unrelated to the current task. Little research has directly assessed the relationship between these two constructs, despite the overlap in clinical significance and the shared importance of attention for healthy functioning. In the present study, I addressed this by having a sample of 40 adults in the United States complete an online sustained attention to response task remotely while answering thought probes related to thought type and time perception. Multilevel modeling results indicated that cognitive factors were related to the judgements of passage of time (JOPOTs; the feeling that time is passing quickly or slowly) while they had little relation to the estimated duration or the accuracy of those estimations. Specifically, JOPOTs were related to attention to task and emotional valence, and the addition of MW, intentionality, and fixed/dynamic thoughts to the models explained additional variance. Duration estimations and JOPOTs were unrelated to each other, suggesting JOPOTs and duration estimations have different relationships to cognitive factors and should be studied as separate constructs. Additionally, results suggested that the heavy use of dichotomization in …