Perceiving an object and its context in different cultures: A cultural look at new look

Shinobu Kitayama, Sean Duffy, Tadashi Kawamura, and Jeff T. Larsen

Psychological Science 14:210-206 (2003)

In two studies, a newly devised test (framed-line test) was used to examine the hypothesis that individuals 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 trials, 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.

Culture shapes how we look at faces

Caroline Blais, Rachael E. Jack, Christoph Scheepers, Daniel Fiset, Roberto Caldara

POLS One 3(8):e3022

Face processing, among many basic visual skills, is thought to be invariant across humans. From as early as 1965, studies of eye movements have consistently revealed a systematic triangular sequence of fixation over the eyes and the mouth, suggesting that faces elicit a universal, biologically-determined information extraction pattern. Here we monitored the eye movements of Western Caucasian and East Asian observers while they learned, recognized, and categorized by race Western Caucasian and East Asian faces. Western Caucasian observers reproduced a scattered triangular pattern of fixations for faces and both races and across tasks. Contrary to intuition, East Asian observed focused more on the central region of the faces. These results demonstrate that face processing can no longer be considered as arising from a universal series of perceptual events. The strategy employed to extract visual information from faces differs across cultures.