Holistic Versus Analytic Perceptual Affordances

Westerners’ perceptions tend to focus on salient foreground objects, whereas Asians are more inclined to focus on contexts. We hypothesized that such culturally specific patterns of attention may be afforded by the perceptual environment of each culture. In order to test this hypothesis, we randomly sampled pictures of scenes from small, medium, and large cities in Japan and the United States. Using both subjective and objective measures, Study 1 demonstrated that Japanese scenes were more ambiguous and contained more elements than American scenes. Japanese scenes thus may encourage perception of the context more than American scenes. In Study 2, pictures of locations in cities were presented as primes, and participants’ subsequent patterns of attention were measured. Both Japanese and American participants primed with Japanese scenes attended more to contextual information than did those primed with American scenes. These results provide evidence that culturally characteristic environments may afford distinctive patterns of perception. Cultural differences in cognition have been widely documented across various domains (Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). Whereas people of Western culture tend to engage in context-independent cognitive processes and to perceive and think about the environment in an analytic way, people of East Asian culture tend to engage in context-dependent cognitive processes and to perceive and think about the environment in a holistic way. In an illustrative study, both Japanese and Americans were shown a short video clip depicting an underwater scene with fish, small animals, plants, and rocks, and were asked to report what they saw in the clip (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). Americans referred mainly to features of focal fish (large, foregrounded, rapidly moving, brightly colored), whereas Japanese referred more to context and to relationships between focal objects and context (background objects and location of objects in relation to one another). Such cultural differences in attention were also found in other tasks stripped of sociocultural context (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003). For example, Kitayama et al. (2003) presented participants with a square frame in which a line was drawn. Participants were then shown other square frames of various sizes and asked to draw a line that was identical to the first line in either absolute length or ratio to the surrounding frame. Kitayama et al. found that whereas Americans were more accurate in the absolute task, Japanese were more accurate in the relative task. These findings suggest that the Japanese were paying more attention to the frame (context) than the Americans were. Although evidence about attentional phenomena is accumulating, a mechanism underlying cultural differences has not been fully explored. In most of the previous cross-cultural studies, cultural differences have been treated mainly as individual differences, which are assumed to be due to socialization (Nisbett et al., 2001). Parents or other individuals may guide children’s attention in accordance with their own pattern of attention (e.g., Fernald & Morikawa, 1993). In addition, Asians’ relatively greater interdependence or concern with the social world may prompt their greater attention to context (Nisbett, 2003). However, in addition to such chronic effects, culture may influence patterns of attention through a more temporary and situational route. For example, using self-construal priming (Gardner, Gabriel, & Lee, 1999), Kühnen and Oyserman (2002) demonstrated that participants who were primed with interdependent self-construals spontaneously encoded contextual information more than did those who were primed with independent self-construals. Address correspondence to Yuri Miyamoto, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church St., Ann Arbor, MI 481091043, e-mail: [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 17—Number 2 113 Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science We examined the possibility that cultural differences in attentional pattern might be directly afforded by cultural differences in the physical environment. On the one hand, if objects are more distinctive and stand out from the background more in the American environment than in the Japanese environment, living in the American environment may direct one’s attention to distinctive and focal objects rather than to backgrounds. On the other hand, if objects are more ambiguous and difficult to distinguish from the background in the Japanese environment than in the American environment, living in the Japanese environment may direct one’s attention to the whole field rather than to specific objects. There is some evidence supporting this speculation. Previous research has shown that people are sometimes blind to changes occurring in the environment (Simons & Levin, 1997), especially changes in the periphery or context (Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 1997). Employing this change-blindness paradigm, we (Masuda & Nisbett, in press) presented both Americans and Japanese with several pairs of animated clips of scenery (e.g., a farm) that differed in various small details. Some of the changes involved the attributes of the focal objects, that is, foreground, rapidly moving objects, and the other changes were made in the field, or context (i.e., changes in the attributes of nonforegrounded objects and their movements in relation to one another). In general, Americans detected more changes in the focal objects than Japanese did, whereas Japanese detected more changes in the field or relationships between objects than Americans did. These results supported the previous findings on cultural differences in attentional pattern (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). However, these cultural differences depended on the type of scenery. There were three types of scenery: Japanese scenery (e.g., a Japanese farm or a Japanese city), American scenery (e.g., an American farm or an American city), and culturally neutral scenery (e.g., a construction site or an airport). Both Japanese and Americans detected more changes in the background when viewing the Japanese scenery than when viewing the American scenery, whereas both detected more changes in the attributes of focal objects when viewing the American scenery than when viewing the Japanese scenery. These findings imply that the perceptual environment prompts culturally specific patterns of attention. Although these findings are suggestive, their implications are limited because the scenes were artificially created and thus may not have accurately represented the perceptual environments of Japan and the United States. One aim of the present study was to compare the perceptual environments of Japan and the United States to determine whether Japanese environments are indeed more complex. The second aim was to examine the effect of exposure to those environments. We hypothesized that culturally specific patterns of attention are afforded by the perceptual environment of each culture. In Study 1, we examined cultural differences in the perceptual environment. In Study 2, we directly tested whether such cultural differences in the perceptual environment actually lead to different patterns of attention. Specifically, we hypothesized that being exposed to the Japanese perceptual environment makes people attend more to contextual information than does being exposed to the American perceptual environment.