Group-level differences in visual search asymmetry

Abstract

East Asians and Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. 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. To investigate the extent to which they depend upon environment, we tested visual search and visual memory in East Asian immigrants who had lived in Canada for different amounts of time. Recent immigrants were found to exhibit no search asymmetry, unlike Westerners who had spent their lives in Canada. However, immigrants who had lived in Canada for more than 2 years showed performance comparable to that of Westerners. These differences could not be explained by the general analytic/holistic processing distinction believed to differentiate Westerners and East Asians, since all observers showed a strong holistic tendency for visual recognition. The results instead support the suggestion that exposure to a new environment can significantly affect the particular processes used to perceive a given stimulus.

Cultural differences in performance on Eriksen’s flanker task

“…Specifically, we had predicted that Turks, as being from a more Eastern culture, would be prone to greater interference from flankers, particularly for stimuli distributed more widely across space (i.e., the far condition) than Americans. Such a finding would be in line with literature indicating that Easterners attend more broadly than Westerners, with corresponding reductions in resolution that could increase interference effects (e.g., Boduroglu & Shah, 2017;Boduroglu et al, 2009;Cramer et al, 2016;Hakim et al, 2017;McKone et al, 2010;Ueda et al, 2018). The data from Experiment 1 do not support this hypothesis.…”

“…These findings suggest that East Asians distribute attention more broadly over space than Americans, but at the expense of representational precision. Others have argued that cultural differences in attentional processes may emerge because visual environments vary in their degree of clutter (e.g., Miyamoto, Nisbett, & Masuda, 2006), with lower levels of clutter fostering higher attentional selectivity and greater spatial focus, resulting in cultural differences in visual search and global-local bias (Cramer, Dusko, & Rensink, 2016;de Fockert, Caparos, Linnell, & Davidoff, 2011;Ueda et al, 2018). These studies demonstrate that research on cultural differences in visual attention has shifted away from an explanation based on cultural differences in holistic versus analytic cognitive style (e.g., McKone et al, 2010) toward more process-based accounts.…”

Spatial Abilities at High Altitude: Exploring the Role of Cultural Strategies and Hypoxia

“…Considering this view, the egocentric frame of reference exploited by the Italian participants could have been the reason for their better performance in the map task, in which left-right rotations have to be encoded by referencing their own position in a particular moment, possibly together with the higher education level (Vasilyeva and Lourenco, 2012). As a matter of fact, Western participants are more prone to focus on a specific object in the scene (Masuda and Nisbett, 2001;Cramer et al, 2016) and this is the skill required to correctly solve a task in which differences are introduced among different (distractor) images.…”

A Three-Level Approach to Understand Cultural Variability and the Evolution of Human Attention

“…A possible concern that exists is whether these findings really reflect cultural differences or other more biological factors, including genetic differences. To address this issue, Cramer et al (2016) examined line search performance with Chinese and Japanese individuals immigrating to Canada. They compared immigrants who entered Canada at an early age, and those who entered Canada recently, and found that recent immigrants showed a pattern similar to East Asians.…”