Cultural influences on oculomotor inhibition of remote distractors: Evidence from saccade trajectories

Abstract

This study investigated whether low-level attentional processes as indicated by saccade trajectories are modulated by higher-order factors as indicated by participants' cultural background. We hypothesized that if the East Asian participants engage in context-dependent attentional processing to a greater extent than the Western participants, then the magnitude of the distractor effect on saccade trajectories (Doyle & Walker, 2001) should be larger with the East Asian participants than with the Western participants. Participants executed vertical saccades towards targets presented on the vertical meridian above or below fixation. Simultaneously with the target, a distractor appeared in one of the screen quadrants. Consistently with our hypothesis, we found evidence that the saccades of the Chinese participants tended to curve away from the distractors more strongly than the saccades of the German participants. However, this effect was restricted to the upper distractors and the lower targets. The findings are discussed in terms of cross-cultural differences in distractor-related activation and inhibition and functional specialization of hemifields.

Cultural Diversity and Saccade Similarities: Culture Does Not Explain Saccade Latency Differences between Chinese and Caucasian Participants

“…It was thus impossible to separate the issue of culture from the issue of ethnicity (or nationality), and we had no independent measure of “culture”. This is also true of a number of other studies in which culture has been claimed to be modifying some process or behaviour [11], [12], [14], [15]. So in both our and these other studies, it is premature to claim that differences in culture explain the functional differences observed.…”

“…In a number of these studies, eye movement metrics have been used to investigate differences between participant groups [11]–[15].…”

Integrating brain, cognition and culture

“…For example, in one study comparing adults' perception of scenes, Western participants attended more to focal objects and sought their classification, while East Asians attended more to contextual information (Chua et al 2005). A subsequent study (Petrova et al 2013) showed that Asian adults were more influenced by distractors when moving their eyes to a target. Similar cultural differences are found in childhood and increase with age (Imada et al 2013).…”

Culture modulates the temporal dynamics of global/local processing

“…In the task requiring local selective attention (i.e., reporting the absolute length without referencing to the surrounding frame), WC observers are more accurate than EA observers, whereas EA observers outperformed WC observers in the task requiring global selective attention (i.e., reporting the relative length by referencing to the surrounding frame). EA observers are also more distracted by unrelated global information and faster at detecting targets at the global level compared to Westerners (Boduroglu et al 2009;Petrova et al 2013), which suggest they might have a global selective attention bias. Within this framework yet, McKone et al (2010) used Navon stimuli to directly quantify the global/local attention bias between Westerners and Easterners.…”

“…They only observed cultural differences in the ERP amplitudes at later stages of information processing (i.e., N400 components; Kutas and Hillyard 1980;Holcomb and Neville 1991). While methodological shortcomings such as significant differences in low-level visual properties of the stimuli should be taken into consideration (Petrova et al 2013), conventional ERP analysis relying on absolute amplitude differences across conditions might not be sensitive enough to reveal early effects (see Vizioli et al 2010). In order to increase the sensitivity of the electrophysiological signals, here we adopted one of the most powerful methods used in the neurophysiological literature, which relies on the neural repetition effect.…”