Perceiving an Object and Its Context in Different Cultures

Abstract

In two studies, a newly devised test (framed-line test) was used to examine the hypothesis that individuals engaging in Asian cultures are more capable of incorporating contextual information and those engaging in North American cultures are more capable of ignoring contextual information. On each trial, participants were presented with a square frame, within which was printed a vertical line. Participants were then shown another square frame of the same or different size and asked to draw a line that was identical to the first line in either absolute length (absolute task) or proportion to the height of the surrounding frame (relative task). The results supported the hypothesis: Whereas Japanese were more accurate in the relative task, Americans were more accurate in the absolute task. Moreover, when engaging in another culture, individuals tended to show the cognitive characteristic common in the host culture.

The magic spell of language: Linguistic categories and their perceptual consequences.

“…Specifically, in this experiment, we used the FLT (Kitayama et al, 2003), a test that can be used to assess the ability to attend to or ignore global, context-insensitive versus specific, context-sensitive information on a basic, perceptual level.…”

“…The distinctive flavor of such an approach is to uncover the general features of the link between language as an attention-driving tool and perception within the same language, thus avoiding potential pitfalls that beset comparative research. It is important to note that the perceptual tasks we used in the current studies not only were especially suited to examine the hypotheses under investigation, but also have been used independently in investigations that have addressed cultural differences (e.g., Kitayama et al, 2003). Moreover, researchers who have addressed differences in linguistic strategies at the cultural level (e.g., Maass et al, 2006;Semin et al, 2002) have relied on the very same feature of language both conceptually and operationally, namely the LCM (Semin & Fiedler, 1988.…”

Beauty and Beholders: Are Past Intuitions Correct?

“…Interestingly, recent research has found that attentional patterns for visual stimuli also seem to vary by culture. For example, Japanese participants are more likely to notice the contextual characteristics of visual scenes, whereas American participants notice salient foreground objects, or focal points (Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, and Larsen 2003;Masuda and Nisbett 2001;Miyamoto, Nisbett, and Masuda 2006). Further, Krentz and Kincade (2012) found that adults (all from an American college), but not infants (relatively naïve to cultural influence), preferred original art with intact focal points over versions where the focal point has been attenuated or removed.…”

The cultural neuroscience of person perception

“…These two different sociocultural systems are known to give rise to dissimilar patterns of cognition . Recent work has shown that these systems are also likely to influence visual attention to aspects of the environment (e.g., Kitayama et al, 2003;Masuda and Nisbett, 2001). Specifically, practices and ideas in Western societies tend to require separating objects from their contexts and interpreting independent and absolute aspects of environmental stimuli (i.e., analytic thinking).…”

“…For instance, Americans are better at recognizing changes in focal objects, whereas Japanese individuals are better at recognizing changes in contexts Nisbett, 2001, 2006). The framed-line test (Kitayama et al, 2003) has been especially useful in demonstrating how these two cultures shape divergent patterns of visual perception and attentional deployment. In the framed-line test, participants are shown a square figure with a vertical line hanging from its top edge (but not spanning the entire height of the square), located in the horizontal center.…”