Time Course of Cultural Differences in Spatial Frequency Use for Face Identification

Abstract

Several previous studies of eye movements have put forward that, during face recognition, Easterners spread their attention across a greater part of their visual field than Westerners. Recently, we found that culture's effect on the perception of faces reaches mechanisms deeper than eye movements, therefore affecting the very nature of information sampled by the visual system: that is, Westerners globally rely more than Easterners on fine-grained visual information (i.e. high spatial frequencies; SFs), whereas Easterners rely more on coarse-grained visual information (i.e. low SFs). These findings suggest that culture influences basic visual processes; however, the temporal onset and dynamics of these culturespecific perceptual differences are still unknown. Here, we investigate the time course of SF use in Western Caucasian (Canadian) and East Asian (Chinese) observers during a face identification task. Firstly, our results confirm that Easterners use relatively lower SFs than Westerners, while the latter use relatively higher SFs. More importantly, our results indicate that these differences arise as early as 34 ms after stimulus onset, and remain stable through time. Our research supports the hypothesis that Westerners and Easterners initially rely on different types of visual information during face processing.Perception is the process through which sensory information is organized, categorized and interpreted so as to create a meaningful subjective representation of the outside world. In this sense, perception can be viewed as an inferential process through which sensory input is associated to signification: for long, it has been a widely accepted theory that visual perception involves "unconscious inferences" -i.e. automatic assumptions about the way physical stimuli should appear -based on one's memories, expectations and attention (see e.g. ref.1 ), and generally, that world knowledge is central to how humans process visual information 2 . That said, the way knowledge about the world is acquired can vary from one culture to another, along with the type of implicit rules that lead to meaningful inferences about visual sensation (see e.g. refs.3,4 ). These culturally circumscribed implicit rules are essential to understand how visual information is coded and associated to stored knowledge. Nonetheless, theories on how visual information is represented and processed have, for decades, rested solely on empirical data from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies 5 , and thus, cannot necessarily be generalized to other populations.As a response, cross-cultural perspectives on human perception have gained increasing interest since the 20th century. For instance, ongoing research has been investigating the influence of culture on the processing of information contained in visual stimuli, and exposed striking differences in the way Western and Eastern cultures allocate their attention across their field of vision [6][7][8][9] . As a matter of fact, culture seems to impact visual p...

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Strategy Shift Toward Lower Spatial Frequencies in the Recognition of Dynamic Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions: When It Moves It Is Different

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