Abstract
BackgroundWhen viewing complex scenes, East Asians attend more to contexts whereas Westerners attend more to objects, reflecting cultural differences in holistic and analytic visual processing styles respectively. This eye-tracking study investigated more specific mechanisms and the robustness of these cultural biases in visual processing when salient changes in the objects and backgrounds occur in complex pictures.Methodology/Principal FindingsChinese Singaporean (East Asian) and Caucasian US (Western) participants passively viewed pictures containing selectively changing objects and background scenes that strongly captured participants' attention in a data-driven manner. We found that although participants from both groups responded to object changes in the pictures, there was still evidence for cultural divergence in eye-movements. The number of object fixations in the US participants was more affected by object change than in the Singapore participants. Additionally, despite the picture manipulations, US participants consistently maintained longer durations for both object and background fixations, with eye-movements that generally remained within the focal objects. In contrast, Singapore participants had shorter fixation durations with eye-movements that alternated more between objects and backgrounds.Conclusions/SignificanceThe results demonstrate a robust cultural bias in visual processing even when external stimuli draw attention in an opposite manner to the cultural bias. These findings also extend previous studies by revealing more specific, but consistent, effects of culture on the different aspects of visual attention as measured by fixation duration, number of fixations, and saccades between objects and backgrounds.
Highlights
A number of studies have demonstrated that the cultural experience of individuals has a significant effect on how visual information is processed
For the US participants, there were positive linear trends over repetitions for the Old/Old (F(1, 15) = 9.39, p,.01, g2 = .39), and Old/New (F(1, 15) = 5.12, p,.05, g2 = .25) conditions but no significant linear trends for the New/Old and New/New conditions (p = .45 and .38 respectively). These results suggest that when objects were repeated during the Old/Old and Old/New conditions, fixation duration to objects in the US participants was magnified over repetitions regardless of the background changes
Our findings suggest that there are stable cultural differences in the way East Asians and Westerners view pictures even when the external stimuli may capture attention in culturally non-preferred ways
Summary
A number of studies have demonstrated that the cultural experience of individuals has a significant effect on how visual information is processed. When examining eye-movements for a subset of their scene stimuli that consisted of singular central objects, their data more resembled Chua et al.’s [10] findings, with East Asian participants making more background fixations than Western participants Such findings suggest that cultural differences during scene viewing may be susceptible to the composition and salient changes in the visual stimuli. Given the consistency of findings on cultural effects on cognition in the behavioral, eyetracking, and neuroimaging literature, we hypothesized that topdown cultural biases of viewing objects and backgrounds would still be expressed in the face of changing stimuli Another possible outcome would be that the data-driven scene changes would override top-down cultural biases such that when picture elements are changed (either the object or background), both Westerners and East Asians’ attention would be drawn towards the novelty rather than repeated elements, and cultural differences are eliminated. We expected that while object change would have an effect on East Asians’ eyemovements, this effect would be less than that observed for Westerners based on the reasons described above
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