Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception

Hannah Faye Chua; Julie E. Boland; Richard E. Nisbett

doi:10.1073/pnas.0506162102

Contributed by Richard E. Nisbett, July 20, 2005

Abstract

In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene. We measured the eye movements of American and Chinese participants while they viewed photographs with a focal object on a complex background. In fact, the Americans fixated more on focal objects than did the Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view a scene.

Footnotes

↵ * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: nisbett{at}umich.edu.
Author contributions: H.F.C., J.E.B., and R.E.N. designed research; H.F.C. performed research; H.F.C. analyzed data; and H.F.C., J.E.B., and R.E.N. wrote the paper.
↵ † The Chinese participants gave higher liking ratings than did the Americans (Ms, 4.64 vs. 4.16; P < 0.005).
↵ ‡ Across both groups and for each participant group, we examined the correlation between six eye-movement variables and the object-memory index, i.e., the difference score between old object-old background memory and old object-new background memory. Of the 18 correlations, only 2 were marginally significant, and neither of these was readily interpretable.
Copyright © 2005, The National Academy of Sciences