On December 11, 2019, Jijia Zhang, Distinguished Professor of Renmin University of China, was invited to give an academic lecture at our school. The topic of the lecture was "Multiculturalism Enhances Cognitive Transformation Function——Evidence from Sibe People". It’s the ninth lecture of the "Language Recognition and Brain Science Lecture Series", chaired by Dr. Qun Yang, a researcher at the center.
In the lecture, Professor Zhang proposed that different nationalities and different languages affect cognitive functions. In his research, the classic cognitive transformation task and the joint cognitive transformation task were adopted to compare the cognitive transformation function of the two ethnic groups in both individual and social contexts. He also explored the influence of multilingual culture on cognitive transformation function. The results revealed that the conversion cost of the Sibe people in Xinjiang is smaller in the individual context. In addition, their joint mechanism is more easily activated in the social context as they have high self-other integration by allocating cognitive resources to characterize the tasks of their peers. The entire study showed that multilingual culture enhanced the cognitive transformation function of individuals.
After the lecture, teachers and students there actively asked questions and had a warm academic exchange with Professor Jijia Zhang.
