Abstract
Cultural differences in spatial perception have been little investigated, which gives rise to the impression that spatial cognitive processes might be universal. Contrary to this idea, we demonstrate cultural differences in spatial volume perception of computer generated rooms between Germans and South Koreans. We used a psychophysical task in which participants had to judge whether a rectangular room was larger or smaller than a square room of reference. We systematically varied the room rectangularity (depth to width aspect ratio) and the viewpoint (middle of the short wall vs. long wall) from which the room was viewed. South Koreans were significantly less biased by room rectangularity and viewpoint than their German counterparts. These results are in line with previous notions of general cognitive processing strategies being more context dependent in East Asian societies than Western ones. We point to the necessity of considering culturally-specific cognitive processing strategies in visual spatial cognition research.
Highlights
Investigating cultural variations in space perception is important for our understanding of basic spatial cognitive processes underlying spatial judgments as well as for the development of urban planning in multicultural environments
We previously found that German’s volume judgments were significantly biased by the egocentric depth of rooms which resulted in a significant interaction between the degree of room rectangularity and viewpoint: depending on viewpoints, rectangular rooms were either perceived as smaller or larger than square rooms of equal volume [3]
Because one cannot infer from the null effect that volume judgments across viewpoints are similar for South Korean subjects, we determined the likelihood that the volume judgments measured in each viewpoint come from the null hypothesis distribution rather than from the alternative hypothesis distribution using Bayes factor (BayesFactor package in R [38])
Summary
Investigating cultural variations in space perception is important for our understanding of basic spatial cognitive processes underlying spatial judgments as well as for the development of urban planning in multicultural environments (e.g. public transport and other indoor spaces). Especially volume perception of indoor spaces, have mostly been studied in Western cultures [1,2,3]. The goal of this study is to understand whether culture can affect perception of indoor spaces such as room size perception. Multiple spatial tasks require the incorporation of contextual information to be performed accurately. This is especially the case for area or volume perception of spaces. If one or more dimensions of the spatial volume are neglected by the perceiver in favour of one single salient dimension of the space (focusing on one aspect of the stimulus while ignoring contextual information), size judgments become ineluctably biased [3,4,5]
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