Abstract
Across cultures, there are marked differences in visual attention that gradually develop between 4 and 6 years of age. According to the social orientation hypothesis, people in interdependent cultures should show more pronounced context sensitivity than people in independent cultures. However, according to the differential familiarity hypothesis, the focus on the salient object should also depend on the familiarity of the stimulus; people will focus more on the focal object (i.e., less context sensitivity), if it is a less familiar stimulus. To examine the differences in visual attention between interdependent and independent cultures while taking into account stimulus familiarity, this study used an eye-tracking paradigm to assess visual attention of participants between 4 and 20 years who came from urban middle-class families from Germany (n = 53; independent culture) or from Nso families in a rural area in Cameroon (n = 50; interdependent culture). Each participant saw four sets of stimuli, which varied in terms of their familiarity: (1) standard stimuli, (2) non-semantic stimuli, both more familiar to participants from Germany, (3) culture-specific matched stimuli, and (4) simple stimuli, similarly familiar to the individuals of both cultures. Overall, the findings show that mean differences in visual attention between cultures were highly contingent on the stimuli sets: In support of the social orientation hypothesis, German participants showed a higher object focus for the culture-specific matched stimuli, while there were no cultural differences for the simple set. In support of the differential familiarity hypothesis, the Cameroonian participants showed a higher object focus for the less familiar sets, namely the standard and non-semantic sets. Furthermore, context sensitivity correlated across all the sets. In sum, these findings suggest that the familiarity of a stimulus strongly affects individuals’ visual attention, meaning that stimulus familiarity needs to be considered when investigating culture-specific differences in attentional styles.
Highlights
The way in which people attend to their visual field differs strongly between cultures
While there was no significant effect of age (β = −0.070, p = 0.624), there was a marginally significant age × culture interaction (β = −0.270, p = 0.061), indicating that developmental changes in context sensitivity differed across cultural contexts
The present study aimed at investigating how the familiarity of stimuli affects cross-cultural differences in context sensitivity expected along the social orientation hypothesis
Summary
The way in which people attend to their visual field differs strongly between cultures. While independent cultures endorse autonomy and consider the self as separate from others, interdependent cultures emphasize relatedness and interconnection of the self and others (Triandis, 1989; Markus and Kitayama, 1991) These differences in social orientation are considered to be a driving force behind the differences in cognitive patterns, which explains why interdependent cultural contexts, such as East Asian societies, show a more holistic style, and independent cultural contexts, such as Western societies, show a more analytic style (Masuda et al, 2019; Nisbett et al, 2001). The authors could demonstrate that communities that are characterized by group collaboration that fosters greater interdependence, such as farming and fishing communities, show a more holistic cognitive style than communities that tend to emphasize individual decision-making and social independence, such as herding communities (Uskul et al, 2008)
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