Cultural Differences in Visual Search for Geometric Figures

Abstract

While some studies suggest cultural differences in visual processing, others do not, possibly because the complexity of their tasks draws upon high-level factors that could obscure such effects. To control for this, we examined cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures, a relatively simple task for which the underlying mechanisms are reasonably well known. We replicated earlier results showing that North Americans had a reliable search asymmetry for line length: Search for long among short lines was faster than vice versa. In contrast, Japanese participants showed no asymmetry. This difference did not appear to be affected by stimulus density. Other kinds of stimuli resulted in other patterns of asymmetry differences, suggesting that these are not due to factors such as analytic/holistic processing but are based instead on the target-detection process. In particular, our results indicate that at least some cultural differences reflect different ways of processing early-level features, possibly in response to environmental factors.

Group-level differences in visual search asymmetry

“…Replicating the results of Ueda et al (2016), Group R-e showed no significant asymmetry (short = 56 ms/item, long = 50 ms/item; p > .2, ratio = 1.29), and Group R-h also showed no significant asymmetry (short = 47 ms/item, long = 42 ms/item; p > .4, ratio = 1.33). Although both groups tended to have slightly higher baselines for short targets, these tendencies were not significant, either for Group R-e (short = 947 ms, long = 904 ms) or Group R-h (short = 1, 025 ms, long = 943 ms; both ps > .35).…”

“…For many conditions, Westerners show a strong search asymmetry: Search for a long line among short ones, for example, is faster than search the other way around (Treisman & Gormican, 1988). East Asians, in contrast, exhibit no asymmetry for these stimuli (Ueda et al, 2016).…”

“…To examine visual attention, we used visual search, in which an observer must detect as quickly as possible the presence of a given target item (a unique color or shape, say) among a set of nontargets, or distractors. For some tasks, Westerners show a strong asymmetry (e.g., search for a long line among short lines is faster than for short among long), whereas East Asians exhibit no such asymmetry (Ueda et al, 2016). To examine visual memory, we used object recognition, which tests visual long-term memory for images of objects in particular backgrounds.…”

“…The target was present on a randomly selected half of the trials in each condition. We replicated the setup of Ueda et al (2016), who followed a relatively common design. In it, observers viewed displays consisting of an array of three, six, or 12 items, with density kept constant.…”

“…For example, visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922-934, 2001). There are also differences in visual search: For Westerners, search is faster for a long line among short ones than for a short line among long ones, whereas this difference does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al, 2016). However, it is unclear how these group-level differences originate.…”