Eye movements may Betray your Culture

Your eye movements may reveal something about your cultural background, researchers have found, in a study comparing the way Easterners and Westerners look at photos.

The scientists not only analyzed participants’ eye movements, but mapped them onto the photos themselves, using lines. They found that Chinese and American people tend to move their eyes over the photos in distinctly different patterns.

Previous studies have revealed differences in thought processes between cultures: North Americans tend to be analytical and pay more attention to foreground objects, while East Asians tend to be more holistic and rely on contextual information.

In the new study, Richard Nisbett and colleagues at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., studied the differences in how these groups actually look at the world.

The researchers measured eye movements of 45 American and Chinese students looking at photographs that had a single foreground object and a complex background; for example, a tiger by a stream.

Cultural differences emerged within the first second of viewing, the researchers reported: American students looked at the foreground object more quickly and fixated on it longer than did Chinese students, while Chinese students made more quick glances to the background.

These results suggest previously reported cultural differences in thought processes may be related to variations in what people focus on as they view a scene, the researchers said. They speculated that these variations may reflect greater importance of context and social interrelationships in East Asian culture compared with Western culture.

The paper appears in this week’s early online edition of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception

Conclusion

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. [The researchers do appear to have even dared to speculate on the possibility of a marked racial component accounting for differences rather than just cultural diversity].

Source 1 - Courtesy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and World Science staff - formerly at www.ichee.org

Source 2 - http://www.pnas.org/content/102/35/12629.abstract