Culture and attention

What is culture?

Way of life of a large group of people grouped in the same geographical location

Behaviours, beliefs, expectations, values and interpretations of symbols (language, emojis) that they agree on (often implicitly), passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next

Cultures are dynamic

They change subtly from one area to the next, from one period of time to the next

idea of consitency over time

implicit - sometimes people from their own culture don’t know what aspects are cultural

Does culture affect congnition?

Most of psychological sciences are conducted on WEIRD populations

• is that a problem?

How do people from different cultures differ in their cognition?

We ned to be careful not to overgeneralise and stereotype

• What we’ll talk about are average differences

Cognition vs performance

• experience affects performance in most tasks, but performance is only a marker of cognition (eg. language production)

Lots of IQ tests are culturally specific

Does culture affect low level cognitive processes

Low level vs high level cognition

low level - the basis

high level - complex by rely on low level functions

Can culture affect perception?

Some believe that culture affects cognition at its most basic level

The myth of invisible ships

• Christopher columbus ships were not seen coming in as the native americans did not know what the concept of a ship was

• this is a myth

• when you don’t expect something it is more difficult to notice and see

Sapir whorf hypothesis

• language affects all the way down to low level cognition

• if you have a different language perception is going to be different around that language

• Eg. more words to describe ice in a language may cause them to have a deeper perception of ice

Russian colours

• People from a russian heritage or spoke russian were quickers at categorising colours

• were they better at perception or categorising?

Can culture affect social attention?

social attention = the priority we automatically give to social stimuli, generally considered to be bottom up

However, top down infleunce and experiences can shape even these processes

Eye contact - western vs east asian cultures

Direct eye contact

• encouraged in western societies

• may be considered rude in eastern cultures (especially with elders)

Do these norm differences affect how people use their attention when it comes to looking at faces

WC and EA faces

• many different tasks

• eye tracking measure

• WC - red bits

• EA - blue bits

• regardless of the race of the face WC looks at peoples eyes and mouths

• EA - looked more just below the eyes in the nose area

Not an absolute but a relative measure

This change in cultural norm can change how people scan others faces

Uono & Hietenan study

RQ - does eye contact perception differ in people with different cultural backgrounds?

FInnish (european) vs Japanese (east asian)

Task - is this face looking at you

Results

Finnish ppts were more accurate in discerning gaze of finnish faces

Finnish ppts showed an own race effect

• better perception for white european faces

Japanese ppts did not show an own race effect

Conclusions

Visual experience with finnish faces throughout development likely led to more effective processing of these faces

Eye contact is quite minimal in Japanese culture so perhaps participants just didn’t have as much experience

Can culture affect attention more generally?

Analytic thinking vs holstic thinking

Analytic - emphasise a linear object-oriented focus

• dominant in western europe and north america

• focus on the object

Holistic - emphasise a non-linear context oriented focus

• dominant in east asian cultures such as China, Korea and Japan

• focus on the context / background

Masuda & Nisbett

‘I saw 3 big fish and 2 small fish’

‘Some fish were swimming near the ocean floor towards the seaweed. in the back other smaller fish swam away from it’

Finding - japanese ppts were more likely than american ppts to make statements regarding contextual info and relationships

Cultural variation in eye-movements during scene percpetion

Asked to describe it and given some time to freely watch the picture with no instruction

Looked at differences in eye movements (contextual background info and focal central objects)

Predicted that if culture affects perception and attention then western people will look at the central and east asian will look at the contextual info

Results

Chinese and american ppts both as likely to fixate on the object and chinese ppts more likely to fixate on the background

Chinese ppts take longer to fixate on the object

Americans spent more time fixating on the object and the background but this differencve was even larger for objects than background

Strong support for cultural differences affecting attention

Plor proportion of fixation not as an average, from the point at which people see the picture

About 500ms pass where american and chinese ppts react in similar ways, for half a second there are no cultural differences and after this you see the split

• americans object fixation

• chinese background fixation

This initial fixation and attention is the same but cultural differences affect what we prioritise

cultural differences do make a difference but mostly here about the more flexible process of what we want to prioritise at the time

What implications does this have for gaze cueing

Gaze cueing paradigms typically use short SOAs

Ppts show the gaze cueing effect regardless of if the cue is predictive

BUT what if we used a longer SOA that let the ppts have time to process the contextual info (ie. that the cue is non-predictive)

Conclusion

• At longer SOA’s Japanese ppts are better at using contextual info and disengage from the irrelevant gaze

Frame & line test

Ppts asked to memorise frame + line within the frame

Absolute task - redraw the length of the line regardless of the box

Relative - recreate the line relative to the overall size

Measured mean absolute error

• JPN better at relative task than absolute and vice versa

Exposure to society around us plays a role

Individuals tended to show the congitive characteristic common in the host culture

When do cultural attention differences develop?

At age 4 - 5 children did not show any difference in accuracy

By ages 6 - 7 JPN children showed better performance, indicating higher context sensitivity

Takes time and exposure to develop cultural differences

Size perception changes based on surrounding context of the target

Cross sectional design - not in the exam

Culture and the physical environment - holistic vs analytic percpetual affordances

Affordance - property of an object that defines its possible uses

Are culturally specific pattersn of attention afforded by the perceptual environment of each culyure?

Scene perception study

Japanese street vs an american street will our attention be affected by the environment

Showed people pictures of these cities and asled them to classify them

American cities almost bare and clear object in the view

Japanese cities less clear cut and more complex

• more ambiguous

Conclusion

• Japanese city scenes are more complex and ambiguous than american city scenes, suggesting that objects look more embedded in the field in the Japanese percpetual environment

Change blindness task

Change blindness task - show a picture flickering and have to determine what changes from one flicker to the next

Flickering resets our memory so we don’t tend to notice

JPN ppts were more likely to detect the change (as they attend more to contextual info)

Both JPN and American ppts who viewed scenes from JPN cities were more able to detect changes

JPN cities helped ppts attend to more contextual info

“Culturally characteristic environments may afford distinctive pattern of perception”

American streets designed in a way to kake you fixate and attend but JPN streets more complex and no specific thing to attend to

Reciprocal feedback loop → cultural differences lead to different street designs → this leads to percpetion changes which lead to this cultural difference

Take home messages

Initial response to stimuli is the same (bottom up) but modulated later, based on the task

Culture shapes how we attend to info

Westerners and East Asians more likely to attend analytically and holistically

• differences are both social and nonsocial

• Easterners tend to take more consideration of contextual info than westerners

Default patterns of attention can be modified

Cognitive psychology paradigms can help to both reveal and improve understanding of cultural differences