Culture and Change Blindness

Abstract

Research on perception and cognition suggests that whereas East Asians view the world holistically, attending to the entire field and relations among objects, Westerners view the world analytically, focusing on the attributes of salient objects. These propositions were examined in the change-blindness paradigm. Research in that paradigm finds American participants to be more sensitive to changes in focal objects than to changes in the periphery or context. We anticipated that this would be less true for East Asians and that they would be more sensitive to context changes than would Americans. We presented participants with still photos and with animated vignettes having changes in focal object information and contextual information. Compared to Americans, East Asians were more sensitive to contextual changes than to focal object changes. These results suggest that there can be cultural variation in what may seem to be basic perceptual processes.

Anger superiority effect for change detection and change blindness

“…Visual search is best with a relaxed, open mind set (Smilek, Enns, Eastwood, & Merikle, 2006). Also, a wider scope of attention and cultural tendencies to a more holistic processing can alleviate change blindness in the periphery of the visual field (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006;Zelinsky, 2001). Interestingly, so too does intelligence (Zhu et al, 2010), proofreading experience (Asano, Kanaya, & Yokosawa, 2008), attention to detail as in Asperger syndrome (Fletcher-Watson et al, 2012;Smith & Milne, 2009) and an appropriately formulated set of instructions emphasizing task centrality (Pearson & Schaefer, 2005).…”

Culture modulates the temporal dynamics of global/local processing

“…Studies comparing Western Caucasian (WC) and East Asian (EA) observers have provided convergent evidence on the cultural perceptual biases characterizing the cognitive styles of those populations (e.g., Nisbett et al 2001;Nisbett and Miyamoto 2005). Westerners preferably focus on local information in objects (e.g., Masuda and Nisbett 2001), scene (e.g., Masuda and Nisbett 2006), and face perception (e.g., Blais et al 2008;Caldara et al 2010). In contrast, individuals from EA cultures-such as China or Japan-display instead a perceptual bias towards global information processing.…”

Internal representations reveal cultural diversity in expectations of facial expressions of emotion.

“…Culture-specific ideologies could exert powerful top-down influences on the perception of the visual environment by imposing particular cognitive styles. For example, individualistic (e.g., Western) cultures could generate tendencies to adopt local feature-processing strategies, whereas collectivist (e.g., East Asian) cultures may promote the use of global processing strategies, as suggested by relative size judgments (Davidoff, Fonteneau, & Goldstein, 2008), categorical reasoning styles (Norenzayan, Smith, Kim, Nisbett, 2002), change blindness sensitivities (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006), and eye movements (Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset, & Caldara, 2008;Caldara, Zhou, & Miellet, 2010;Kelly, Miellet, & Caldara, 2010). By using distinct cognitive processing strategies, observers likely acquire culture-specific perceptual experiences of the visual environment, including facial expression signals.…”