Culture is shaped by the different rules that exist in human societies and affects the social behaviour of people (Macionis et al, 2011). For example, Western culture emphasizes autonomy, independence and uniqueness, while Asian culture emphasizes teamwork connection, harmony and compliance (Varnum et al., 2010). The statements above are depicted in the constructs of individualism and collectivism (Senzaki, Masuda and Ishii, 2014). More specifically, individualist cultures highlight the needs of the individual concerning the needs of the group as a whole (Triandi, 1995). Members of individualistic cultures are considered independent and autonomous. The attitudes and preferences of people identify their social behaviour, so, the cultures of North America and Western Europe tend to be individualistic (Miyamoto, et al., 2006). On the other hand, in collectivist cultures, the needs and goals of the group as a whole are highlighted over the needs and desires of each individual. In these cultures, the interface between people and relationships with other members of the team play a central role in the identity of each individual (Triandi, 1995; Hofstede, 2001). Examples of cultures that tend to be more collectivist are the cultures of Asia, Central America and Africa (Miyamoto, et al., 2006).

Many studies compared members of interdependent and collectivist East Asian cultures with an independent and individualist European American cultures into picture perception (Kitayama and Uskul, 2011; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005). These showed that East Asians are more likely to attend to the perceptual field as a whole and to perceive relationships between a salient object and background than European Americans who are more likely to attend the salient object (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003). Senzaki, Masuda and Ishii (2014) demonstrated the existence of culturally unique patterns of attention, focusing on cultural differences that occur when participants observed an image and then described the image. According to cultural psychologists in a given society, narratives and practices historically inform a set of meaning systems, this is referred to as a worldview. Also, a culturally specific thinking style develops based on such culturally defined worldviews (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003). For example, North Americans’ patterns of attention are influenced by their unique social and historical background. The emphasis on the identification of each object’s stable properties, which is independent of context is the characteristic of this type of attention (Senzaki, Masuda and Ishii 2014). On the other hand, East Asians’ patterns of attention, prioritize a holistic understanding of the complexity and interrelatedness among objects, emphasizing context rather than objects’ properties. This happens because influenced by ancient Chinese meaning systems ( Cromer, 1993; Senzaki, Masuda and Ishii 2014). European Canadian students and Japanese students took part and were asked to observe vignettes of underwater scenes and then to describe what they had perceived. Results found that while using an eye tracker that records the position of the eyes and the movements they make, both groups observed the salient object similarly. However, when testing the narrative, the results highlighted cultural differences in patterns of attention. This study further supports Chun and Wolfe’s (2001) assertion that visual experiences are specific to contextual constructs and an individual’s attention. According to Chua, Boland & Nisbett (2005), European and Chinese students watched some pictures. The characteristic of these images was that they contained animals or vehicles in the foreground. The result was that the European American students would observe the focal object more quickly. On the other hand, Chinese students focused on the background first. It is now widely accepted that there is a difference in the mode of processing information between people from different cultures, with East Asians being more holistic, and Westerners being more analytic (Kitayama and Uskul, 2011; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005).

References

Alotaibi, A., Underwood, G., & Smith, A. D. (2017). Cultural differences in attention: Eye movement evidence from a comparative visual search task. Consciousness and cognition, 55, 254-265.

Armel, K., Beaumel, A., & Rangel, A. (2008). Biasing simple choices by manipulating relative visual attention. Judgment And Decision Making, 3(5), 396-403.

Boduroglu, A., & Shah, P. (2017). Cultural differences in attentional breadth and resolution. Culture and Brain, 5(2), 169-181.

Boduroglu, A., Shah, P., & Nisbett, R. (2009). Cultural Differences in Allocation of Attention in Visual Information Processing. Journal Of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(3), 349-360.                 doi:10.1177/0022022108331005

Chua, H., Boland, J., & Nisbett, R. (2005). From The Cover: Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, 102(35), 12629-12633. doi:10.1073/pnas.0506162102

Chun, M. M. and J. Wolfe, 2001. Visual Attention. Blackwell’s Handbook of Perception. E. B. Goldstein. Oxford, UK, Blackwell: 272-310.

Clement, M. C. (2000). Making time for teacher induction: A lesson from the New Zealand model. The Clearing House, 73(6), 329-330.

Cristino,F.,Mathot,S.,Theeuwes,J.,&Gilchrist,I.D.(2010).ScanMatch:Anovelmethodforcomparing fixationsequences.BehaviourResearchMethods,42,692–700. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BRM.42.3.692.

Cromer, A. (1993). Uncommon sense: The heretical nature of science. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eckstein, M. (2011). Visual search: A retrospective. Journal Of Vision, 11(5), 14-14. doi:10.1167/11.5.14

Glaholt, M., Wu, M., & Reingold, E. (2010). Evidence for top-down control of eye movements during visual decision making. Journal Of Vision, 10(5), 15-15. doi:10.1167/10.5.15

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage (co-published in the PRC as Vol. 10 in the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press SFLEP Intercultural Communication Reference Series, 2008)

Kitayama, S., & Uskul, A. (2011). Culture, Mind, and the Brain: Current Evidence and Future Directions. Annual Review Of Psychology, 62(1), 419-449. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145357

Macionis, John J; Gerber, Linda Marie (2011). Sociology. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 53. ISBN 978-0137001613. OCLC 652430995.

Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2006). Culture and change blindness. Cognitive science, 30(2), 381-399.

Miyamoto, Y., Nisbett, R., & Masuda, T. (2006). Culture and the Physical Environment: Holistic Versus Analytic Perceptual Affordances. Psychological Science, 17(2), 113-119. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01673.x

Nisbett, R.E. and Masuda, T. (2003) Culture and point of view. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 100, 11163–11175

Nisbett, R., & Miyamoto, Y. (2005). The influence of culture: holistic versus analytic perception.Trends In Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 467-473. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.004

Senzaki, S., Masuda, T., & Ishii, K. (2014). When Is Perception Top-Down and When Is It Not? Culture, Narrative, and Attention. Cognitive Science, 38(7), 1493-1506. doi:10.1111/cogs.12118

Silayoi, P. & Speece, M. (2007). The importance of packaging attributes: a conjoint analysis approach. European Journal Of Marketing, 41(11/12), 1495-1517.                                                   doi:10.1108/03090560710821279

Singelis, T. (1994). The Measurement of Independent and Interdependent Self-Construals. Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(5), 580-591. doi:10.1177/0146167294205014

Treisman, A., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology,12(1), 97-136. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(80)90005-5

Triandis, H.  C. (1995).  Individualism and  collectivism.  Boulder,  CO: Westview Press.

Ueda, Y., Chen, L., Kopecky, J., Cramer, E. S., Rensink, R. A., Meyer, D. E., … & Saiki, J. (2018). Cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures. Cognitive science, 42(1), 286-310.

Varnum, M. E. W., Grossmann, I., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E. (2010). The origin of cultural differences in cognition: Evidence for the social orientation hypothesis. Current Direction in Psychological Science, 19, 9–13.