Wired: Japanese More Sensitive Than Westerners to the Big Picture
When people raised in a Western culture look at a picture, they instinctively isolate the central subject from its surroundings -- but when East Asians look at the same image, they see its entirety. So says a study published this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [PDF here] -- and though fixed conclusions shouldn't be drawn too hastily, the findings add to evidence that culture modulates perception in very different ways. To explore the phenomenon, psychologists led by the University of Alberta's Takahiko Masuda assembled pictures containing a single person in the foreground and four people in the background. When asked how the foregrounded person -- their face manipulated to look happy, angry or sad -- appeared to feel, nearly three-quarters of 36 Japanese test subjects said their perception was influenced by the emotions of the background figures. By contrast, nearly three-quarters of 39 North American participants said the people in the background didn't affect them at all. When the researchers tracked the viewers' eye movements, they found that Japanese gazes flitted quickly to the background, while North Americans fixated on the central subject. "East Asians seem to have a more holistic pattern of attention, perceiving people in terms of the relationships to others," said study co-author Takahiko Masuda in a press release...more...
I used to think everyone was mad when I 1st came to Japan
