A study has been done previously by Masuda and Nisbett in 2001 showing that there is a difference between East Asians (Japanese in this study) and Westerners (Americans) in perceiving images of animals in the same or new backgrounds(Chua, Boland, and Nesbitt, 2005). The mental representation that was noted for the two participants differentiated greatly on the amount of detail between focal objects and the backgrounds. To further explain, if culture did influence how participants encode scenes they perceive then the saccade patterns would be different across cultures (Chua, Boland, and Nesbitt, 2005). This is an important topic because it’s crucial to understand how and if a culture does influence the focus of attention in levels of cognition when both of these groups are in the same environment. If culture does influence the focus of attention, in this case with the perception of scenes this information can be used to help both of these groups (Eastern and Western) be more understanding of how the other processes information(Chua, Boland, and Nesbitt, 2005).
Specific Hypotheses
In the experiment, it was hypothesized that Americans would spend more time on the focal object of an image than on the context of the Chinese participants. The Chinese participants were to view the image holistically and combine both contextual and focal features and have more saccades than the Americans. The last hypothesis is if no difference between eye movement between the cultures then previous findings of memory encoding and recall from scene perception and judgment are due to what occurs in memory retrieval or reporting.
MethodfromMethod from
25 European American Grad students and 27 international Chinese students of average ages of 24.3-25.4 years were used in this study. The study then went on to three different phases using a combination of 72 images that participants needed a view to complete the task to collect data. Phase 1: First time seeing images for about 3 seconds then rating how much they like an image on a scale of 1-7. Then participants were taken out of the room for 10 minutes to do distraction tasks. Phase 2: Participants were brought back in to work on recognition memory. Participants were to judge as fast as possible if they have seen the image being presented before or not. Phase 3: Participants then engaged in an object familiarity task at from end to see if they have seen the image before in real life or not. Lastly, the participants filled out a demographic questionnaire, they were debriefed and given their payment(Chua, Boland, and Nesbitt, 2005).
Results
To evaluate the results the statistical testscollectivisticused an F-test paired with a two-way ANOVA. Within 300-400ms looking at the image, there was no cultural difference as both groups focused on the background, by around 420ms American participants were looking at both background and focal object equally. During a period of 420-1,100 ms, American participants aimed their fixation on the focal objects more, however, from 1,100ms to 3,000ms the Chinese participants focused more on the background. Together the findings between fixation regions and time length of fixation can support the research question with an answer that there is a cultural difference in eye movement and possibly in judgment and memory across cultures(Chua, Boland, and Nesbitt, 2005).
Discussion
Researchers’ Conclusions
The researchers discuss that this study demonstrates the function of different eye movements between cultures by noticing how Americans encode more visual details understatefor focal objects due to their eye fixations being sooner and longer while Chinese participants fixated on a balance on both the background and focal object which explains their encoding of visual scenes holistically. The differences in visual memory are due to how Eastern and Westerns view scenes and not necessarily due to their cultural norms and expectations in their cultures for reporting on this information(Chua, Boland, and Nesbitt, 2005).
My Conclusions
The results can correlate to how Eastern Asian cultures are bycollectivistic cultures versus the cultures in the individualistic culture of Americans. In Eastern cultures, they tend to live their lives as a collectivistic culture. It would make sense to see resulted data that reflects that they even encode their scythe cultures very in the same format as everyday collective group structure. This cultural function of individualism can be seen in how Westerns focused and encoded from more for the focal objects quite similarly to how Westerns would interact as one specific being in a crowd instead of the group structure.
Limitations
Some limitations of this study can be linked to demographics of ethnicity, age, and education level. Mainly just domestic European American and international Chinese students were used in this study. If other demographics such as Latin Americans and Asian Pacific countries could’ve presented different results in fixations and encoding. The age range prevented other generations to provide data as images seen vary from generation from culture to culture. Lastly, using a demographic of just graduate students limits the possibility of the amount of Western and Eastern participants in the study.
Implications For Cognition
In Cognition, this study can be helpful o understathe ndandunderstate how a reaction time task can be based on how cultural influences encodingencodeby visual information memory. This interest would provide information on the time and amount of saccades different cultures have when encoding visual information and how that is bound together in a focus attention stage where visual images have been combined. This can also provide some additional information on attention to images that have been viewed before the participants by cultural priming or mere exposure effect.
Application
This knowledge of how different Western and Eastern cultures encode scenery can help integrate ways to eliminate binding foreground images and background images together (for Easterns) and to eliminate visual biases of a group that “stands” out from a crowd (Westerns). This could benefit anyone working in an educational, political, or, even generationwithiunderstate for media. This can be particularly useful in understanding how Westerners view Eastern Asians within a social setting and vice versa. The awareness of how each culture views a situation can explain how they react and for future interactions to be more positive it’ll be important to know how to structure environments so both parties can encode visual information the way it’s meant to be presented.
