Time Course of Cultural Differences in Spatial Frequency Use for Face Identification

Amanda Estéphan,Marie-Pier Plouffe-Demers,Ye Zhang,Caroline Blais,Daniel Fiset,Dan Sun,Camille Saumure

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-19971-1

Abstract

Several previous studies of eye movements have put forward that, during face recognition, Easterners spread their attention across a greater part of their visual field than Westerners. Recently, we found that culture’s effect on the perception of faces reaches mechanisms deeper than eye movements, therefore affecting the very nature of information sampled by the visual system: that is, Westerners globally rely more than Easterners on fine-grained visual information (i.e. high spatial frequencies; SFs), whereas Easterners rely more on coarse-grained visual information (i.e. low SFs). These findings suggest that culture influences basic visual processes; however, the temporal onset and dynamics of these culture-specific perceptual differences are still unknown. Here, we investigate the time course of SF use in Western Caucasian (Canadian) and East Asian (Chinese) observers during a face identification task. Firstly, our results confirm that Easterners use relatively lower SFs than Westerners, while the latter use relatively higher SFs. More importantly, our results indicate that these differences arise as early as 34 ms after stimulus onset, and remain stable through time. Our research supports the hypothesis that Westerners and Easterners initially rely on different types of visual information during face processing.

Highlights

Perception is the process through which sensory information is organized, categorized and interpreted so as to create a meaningful subjective representation of the outside world
During a change-detection task featuring four uniquely colored squares, Easterners are better than Westerners at detecting changes in the periphery, but worse at detecting changes in the central visual field[8], which corroborates the propensity of Easterners to attend more to the periphery of their visual field than Westerners
We have shown that the impact of culture on face processing goes deeper than the differences revealed in eye movement patterns, and can be observed in the nature of the visual information extracted by both cultures, namely the spatial frequency (SF) they use[11]

Summary

Introduction

Perception is the process through which sensory information is organized, categorized and interpreted so as to create a meaningful subjective representation of the outside world. East Asian participants are more influenced, compared to Western Caucasian participants, by the expression of surrounding faces when asked to judge the intensity of a central figure’s facial expression[7,15], and have more difficulty than Westerners recalling whether they previously viewed an object if it is presented to them on a different background than the one on which they had first seen it[16,17] These findings have supported the assumption that Easterners integrate the focal object along with its background during memory encoding, whereas Westerners encode the focal object independently from its background

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