PSY2002 S2 W5 Culture & Attention Flashcards
(22 cards)
What is culture?
Way of life 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.
Is psychological science affected by culture?
Yes and most psychological science are conducted on WEIRD Populations. Which limits the generalisability of the results.
What is WEIRD Population?
Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic Societies
What are cautions we need to take when investigating the affect of culture on cognition?
Caution: we need to be careful not to overgeneralize and stereotype. What we’ll talk about are average differences.
Caution 2: Cognition versus performance: experience affects performance in most tasks, but performance is only a marker of cognition (e.g., language production)
What is high level cognition?
Systematic Decision Making
Brainstorming
Creativity
Rule usage
High Level cognition is conscious, flexible, late evolution and can change
What is low-level cognition?
Perception
Attention
Encoding
Low-level are unconscious, inflexible, early evolution, mostly hard-wired.
Can culture affect perception?
Some believe that culture affects cognition at its most basic level (low-level).
The myth of the invisible ships - Joseph Banks
Sapir-Whorf Hypotheis
Winawer et al. 2006 - what levels does language affect processing?
What is social attention
the priority we automatically give to social stimuli, generally considered to be bottom-up
However, top-down influences and experiences can shape even these processes.
What is the difference in eye-contact between western vs east Asian cultures?
Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset & Caldara (2008)
Direct eye-contact: encouraged in western societies. May be considered rude in eastern cultures (especially with elders)
No matter the race of the examiner the participants from western societies were more likely to look at the eyes than those from Easter cultures that were looking more at the nose.
Does eye contact perception differ in people with different cultural backgrounds?
Uono & Hietenan 2015
Finnish (European) vs Japanese (East Asian)
Task: Is this face looking at you?
Results:
The lower the number the more accurate
Own Race Effect:
Finish participants were more accurate in discerning gaze of Finish faces
Finish participants showed an ‘own-race’ effect – better perception for White European faces
Japanese participants did not show an ‘own race’ effect
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 Holistic thinking
Analysis: emphasize a linear object-oriented focus (dominant in waster Europa and nother America)
Holistic: Emphasize a non-linear context oriented focus (dominant in east Asian cultures such as China, Korea and Japan)
What did Masuda and Nisbett, 2001 find?
Where do people focused there attention: Individuals vs Background
Finding: Japanese participants were more likely than American participants to make statements regarding contextual information and relationships then
What findings are there on cultural variation in eye-movement during scene perception?
Chua et al. 2005
Contextual background information – rivers, trees, rock, mountains.
Foal central objects: plan, tiger
Results: “Differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view a scene”
However, Senzaki et al. (2014): Japanese participants’ attention was the same, until they were asked to report what is going on.
Chinese were more likely to fixate on the background. Americans were faster at fixating on the object. Americans were longer to fixate on object. Difference between American and Chinese but mostly from 400 milliseconds. When participants do not need to describe image (no goal) there is no difference between Americans and chinese.
What implications does the cultural variation in eye movement have for gaze cueing?
Gaze cueing paradigms typically use short SOAs
Participants show the gaze cueing effect regardless of if the cue is predictive
BUT what if we used a longer SOA that let the participant have time to process the contextual information (i.e. that the cue is non-predictive)?
How does cultural variation in scene perception affect relative task?
Japanese participants were better at the relative tasks because they noticed the context more. The opposite was found for American participants.
What is the Frame and Line test?
Kitayama et al. 2003
EXposure to society around us plays a role. Individuals tended to show the cognitive characteristic common in the host culture.
Americans living in Japan were better in the relative tasks compared to absolute tasks.
When do cultural attention-differences develop?
Imada et al. 2013
At age 4-5 children did not show any difference in accuracy.
By age 6-7 Japanese children showed better performance, indicating higher context sensitivity
Culture and the physical environment: holistic vs. analytic perceptual affordances
Miyamoto et al. 2006
Affordance: property of an object that defines its possible uses
Are culturally specific patterns of attention afforded by the perceptual environment of each culture?
Study 1: Scene perception study
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 perceptual environment.
What was Miyamotor et al. 2006 Study 2 on change blindness task?
Japanese participants were more likely to detect the change (as they attend more to contextual information)
Both Japanese and American participants who viewed scenes from Japanese cities were more able to detect changes
Japanese cities helped participants attend to more contextual information.
“Culturally characteristic environments may afford distinctive patterns of perception”
Does culture affect cognition?
Initial response to stimuli is the same (bottom-up) but modulated later, based on the task.
Culutre shapes how we attend to information
Does culture affect attention?
Westerners and East Asians attend more likely to attend analytically and holistically:
Differences are both social and non-social
Easterners tend to take more consideration of contextual information than Westerners
Default patterns of attention can be modified
What did Kitayama et am. 2003 find?
Reading
Asians are described as holistic or field dependent in cognitive style. These culturally divergent cognitive characteristics have been examined with several different measures, such as attitude attribution, performance in a rod-and-frame task, a Stroop interference effect, and context-dependent memory.
Americans performed the absolute task significantly better than Japanese, and the reverse was true for performance in the relative task.
Examined from a different angle, performance in the relative task was significantly better for Japanese in Japan than for Americans in the United States, but performance in the absolute task was better for Americans in the United States than for Japanese in Japan.
The current work is consistent with recent theorizing on cultural variation in cognition in showing that Japanese are more capable of incorporating contextual information in making a judgment on Japanese in Japan
