The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention Across Cultures: The Impact of Stimulus Familiarity

Abstract

Across cultures, there are marked differences in visual attention that gradually develop between 4 and 6 years of age. According to the social orientation hypothesis, people in interdependent cultures should show more pronounced context sensitivity than people in independent cultures. However, according to the differential familiarity hypothesis, the focus on the salient object should also depend on the familiarity of the stimulus; people will focus more on the focal object (i.e., less context sensitivity), if it is a less familiar stimulus. To examine the differences in visual attention between interdependent and independent cultures while taking into account stimulus familiarity, this study used an eye-tracking paradigm to assess visual attention of participants between 4 and 20 years who came from urban middle-class families from Germany (n = 53; independent culture) or from Nso families in a rural area in Cameroon (n = 50; interdependent culture). Each participant saw four sets of stimuli, which varied in terms of their familiarity: (1) standard stimuli, (2) non-semantic stimuli, both more familiar to participants from Germany, (3) culture-specific matched stimuli, and (4) simple stimuli, similarly familiar to the individuals of both cultures. Overall, the findings show that mean differences in visual attention between cultures were highly contingent on the stimuli sets: In support of the social orientation hypothesis, German participants showed a higher object focus for the culture-specific matched stimuli, while there were no cultural differences for the simple set. In support of the differential familiarity hypothesis, the Cameroonian participants showed a higher object focus for the less familiar sets, namely the standard and non-semantic sets. Furthermore, context sensitivity correlated across all the sets. In sum, these findings suggest that the familiarity of a stimulus strongly affects individuals' visual attention, meaning that stimulus familiarity needs to be considered when investigating culture-specific differences in attentional styles.

Cross-Cultural Differences in the Generation of Novel Ideas in Middle Childhood

“…Finally, especially the alternative uses and pattern association tasks seem to be suited for an application in non-Western and rural contexts because they are conducted with very simple materials, which are likewise familiar (objects) or novel (pattern) to children in these contexts (cf. Jurkat et al, 2020).…”

The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention in Urban and Rural Brazil

“…Overall, we found a differential pattern of results between tasks and also no consistent evidence for a correlation between tasks, which corresponds to the findings of former studies ( Na et al, 2010 ; Köster et al, 2018 ). Thus, cross-cultural differences in visual attention are highly task- and stimulus-dependent (see also Jurkat et al, 2020 ; Köster et al, 2018 ) and their early development seems to be more complex than previously assumed. In particular, both environmental affordances and social orientation may contribute, each in their own ways, to different aspects of children’s perceptual development.…”

“…Like former studies, these findings do not suggest that the social orientation hypothesis (Varnum et al, 2010) generalizes to cultural contrast beyond the comparison between East Asian and United States populations (cf. Jurkat et al, 2020).…”

“…Another, more methodologically oriented, explanatory account is that participants from urban environments are generally more familiar with the visual stimuli in the commonly applied tasks ( Jurkat et al, 2020 ; Köster et al, 2018 ) which allows them to process stimuli more efficiently, first the object, and then the context information. In accordance with this proposal, it has recently been shown that context-sensitive attention measures depend on the type of stimuli used, and that results may look different, tilted more toward the social orientation hypothesis, when stimuli are more carefully adjusted to the specific environment they are tested in Jurkat et al (2020) . Possibly, this may explain why we did not find a difference in context-sensitive attention in the picture description task in the present study, where we explicitly used pictures that were familiar to participants from both urban and rural Brazil.…”

“…In recent developmental studies on cross-cultural differences in context-sensitive attention, a specific focus lied on the comparison between participants from rural and urban environments ( Bremner et al, 2016 ; Jurkat et al, 2020 ; Köster et al, 2018 ). Bremner et al (2016) reported that children from a traditional Himba society in rural Namibia showed significantly less deception in an Ebbinghaus illusion task than did children growing up in the nearest urban settlement in Namibia or children growing up in urban United Kingdom.…”