ScientificAmerican.com August 23, 2005

Americans and Chinese Differ in Their World View -- Literally

A study of Chinese and American students has found that the two groups

looked at scenes in photographs in distinct ways. The findings indicate

that previously observed cultural differences in judgment and memory

between East Asians and North Americans derive from differences in what

they actually see.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that whereas North

Americans tend to be more analytic when evaluating a scenario, fixating

on the focal object, East Asians are generally more holistic, giving

more consideration to the context. Researchers have not known, however,

whether these differences originate during the encoding, retrieval, or

mental comparison stages of perceptual-cognitive processing, or whether

they might even be the result of reporting bias.

To try to pinpoint when these differences emerge, Richard E. Nisbett of

the University of Michigan and his colleagues conducted a series of

experiments in which Chinese and American students were shown a number

of images, each depicting a single subject against a realistic and

complex background. The participants--who wore an eye-movement tracker

during the tests--were then shown pictures containing the same subjects

on either old or new backgrounds and asked to judge whether they had

seen the subjects before.

As the team predicted, the American students homed in on the focal

subject sooner and longer than did the Chinese students, who paid more

attention to the background imagery. (In the image above, eye gaze

patterns of an American individual appear on top; those of a Chinese

individual on the bottom.) This suggests that the Americans encoded

more visual details for the focal objects than did the Chinese, which

would explain why the Americans fared better when it came to

determining whether they had seen a given subject before, even when it

was presented against a new backdrop.

Nisbett and his collaborators posit that these differences in attention

to object and context arise through socialization practices. "East

Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role

relations. Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective

functioning," the scientists observe. "In contrast, Westerners live in

less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them

to pay less attention to context." The findings are being published

online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences.

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