When shown a photo, Chinese pay more attention to the background
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently, researchers say in a new study.
Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. Their findings were reported in today's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students: 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.
"They literally are seeing the world differently," said Nisbett. "Asians live in more socially complicated world than we do," he said in a telephone interview. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists."
Harmony vs. individualism
The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said. In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.
Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen. So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.
He illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.
The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on bottom and then mention the fish.
Tracking eye movement
The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, he said.
In the latest test, the researchers tracked the eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they looked at pictures.
The Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner , a leopard in the jungle for example, and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background, he said.
Kyle R. Cave of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst commented: "These results are particularly striking because they show that these cultural differences extend to low-level perceptual processes such as how we control our eyes. They suggest that the way that we see and explore the world literally depends on where we come from." [s:11] [s:49]
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