How Much Information? East Asian and North American Cultural Products and Information Search Performance

Abstract

Literature in cultural psychology suggests that compared with North Americans, East Asians prefer context-rich cultural products (e.g., paintings and photographs). The present article further examines the preferred amount of information in cultural products produced by East Asians and North Americans (Study 1: Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference posters; Study 2: government and university portal pages). The authors found that East Asians produced more information-rich products than did North Americans. Study 3 further examined people's information search speed when identifying target objects on mock webpages containing large amounts of information. The results indicated that East Asians were faster than North Americans in dealing with information on mock webpages with large amounts of information. Finally, the authors found that there were cultural differences as well as similarities in functional and aesthetic preferences regarding styles of information presentation. The interplay between cultural products and skills for accommodating to the cultural products is discussed.

Seeing the Big Picture: Multitasking and Perceptual Processing Influences on Ad Recognition

“…Although positive mood participants did not quite perform worse than negative mood participants on a single task, positive people tended to perceive the single task to be more difficult than did people in a negative mood (the reverse is true for the three-task condition). While it might be that processing style makes it easier to perceptually process more things at once-trait holistic processors have been found to prefer more complex and information-rich visual products, such as art, graphic design, and websites (Wang et al 2012) and draw pictures with more background and details (Masuda et al 2008)-this also leaves open the possibility that only processing one thing, with little other context or complexity, may be more difficult to do while processing holistically.…”

“…This was potentially due to preference for more visual and information rich environments by holistic processors. A follow-up study revealed that holistic processors were able to find a target image in a visually "busy" web page more quickly than were analytic processors (Wang et al 2012). Holistic processing style (indicated by cultural background) also predicts preference for attending to global configurations rather than prioritizing the individual local elements in a figure (McKone et al 2010).…”

“…Holistic processors (Japanese participants) showed broader eye movements for images with multiple objects compared to simple scenes or single focal objects (Ueda and Komiya 2012). A content analysis of university and government portal webpages from East Asian (holistic) and North American (analytic) countries showed that websites from more holistically oriented countries had longer pages and also contained more information than the analytic countries' web pages (Wang et al 2012). This was potentially due to preference for more visual and information rich environments by holistic processors.…”

“…Goh, Tan, and Park (2009) found that analytic processors tended to have longer eye fixation duration during visual information processing and therefore processed individual items in more detail. In contrast to holistic processers, analytic processors have shown to prefer-as well as create-visual environments with less overall information (Wang et al 2012) and show more concentrated eye movements on a focal figure or feature (e.g., Srinivasan et al 2009;Masuda and Nisbett 2001).…”

“…Competition for resources may be mitigated by the increased distribution (breadth) of visual attention that holistic processors tend to employ (McKone et al 2010;Ueda and Komiya 2012). Holistic processors prefer complex, information-rich visual environments (e.g., Masuda et al 2008;Wang et al 2012) and tend to distribute visual attention more broadly (e.g., Goh, Tan, and Park 2009); this may facilitate encoding of fewer details of any given item but enable broader perceptual processing in an environment with competing items (Srinivasan et al 2009). As a result, holistic processors may be worse at encoding details of individual focal items but better than analytic processors at encoding more broadly in a visually competitive media environment.…”