Read between the Eyes: Effects of Culturally-Based Cognitive Styles on the use of Peripheral Displays

Cognitive styles have been shown to influence the ways people make sense of information and perceive visual scenes. Americans tend to use an analytic cognitive style, resulting in a focus on central objects; Chinese tend to use a holistic style, resulting in a focus on the entire scene. In this study, we examine how these different cognitive styles affect attention to information presented on a peripheral display. American and Chinese participants performed two different tasks; one on a central display and one on a peripheral display. Eye tracking was used to measure how much time was spent looking at each display, and how often each was viewed. As predicted, Chinese participants performed better than American participants on the peripheral display task. In addition, Chinese participants’ attention allocation strategies were more sensitive to the visual complexity of the peripheral information. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of peripheral display systems.