Abstract
Researchers have proposed that the culture in which we are raised shapes the way that we attend to the objects and events that surround us. What remains unclear, however, is how early any such culturally-inflected differences emerge in development. Here, we address this issue directly, asking how 24-month-old infants from the US and China deploy their attention to objects and actions in dynamic scenes. By analyzing infants' eye movements while they observed dynamic scenes, the current experiment revealed striking convergences, overall, in infants' patterns of visual attention in the two communities, but also pinpointed a brief period during which their attention reliably diverged. This divergence, though modest, suggested that infants from the US devoted relatively more attention to the objects and those from China devoted relatively more attention to the actions in which they were engaged. This provides the earliest evidence for strong overlap in infants' attention to objects and events in dynamic scenes, but also raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants' attention may also be shaped subtly by the culturally-inflected attentional proclivities characteristic of adults in their cultural communities.
Highlights
Do the cultures in which we live shape the way that we view the objects and events in the world that surrounds us? This question, which has captivated curiosities for centuries, engages fundamental questions about which human capacities are universal and how they are shaped by experience
To compare infants’ patterns of attention during the test phase, when two different test scenes were available for inspection, we calculated for each infant and each trial, the mean proportion of looking time devoted to the New Object— Familiar Action
The work presented here takes advantage of precise time-course analyses to provide new insight into how infants from the US and China deploy their visual attention while watching dynamic scenes as they unfold
Summary
Do the cultures in which we live shape the way that we view the objects and events in the world that surrounds us? This question, which has captivated curiosities for centuries, engages fundamental questions about which human capacities (if any) are universal and how they are shaped by experience. The Chinese devoted more attention to the background than did the Americans Differences like these have been documented in a variety of tasks that tap into adults’ perceptual, social, and reasoning capacities (Ji et al, 2000; Masuda and Nisbett, 2001, 2006; Nisbett et al, 2001; Kitayama et al, 2003; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Chua et al, 2005; Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005; Richland et al, 2007; Masuda et al, 2008; see Imai and Masuda, 2013, for a broader review). These culturally-guided differences have been documented in children as young as 3 or 4 years of age in capacities as diverse as attention, cognition and language (Imai et al, 2005, 2008, 2010; Saalbach and Imai, 2007; Lockhart et al, 2008; Duffy et al, 2009; Hanania and Smith, 2010; Richland et al, 2010; Göksun et al, 2011; Kuwabara et al, 2011; Kuwabara and Smith, 2012; Moriguchi et al, 2012; Imada et al, 2013)
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