Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

114 CHAPTER 3 Sensation and PerceptionCULTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIORWays of SeeingDo people in different cultures perceive the world differently? InChapter 1, we described two types of cultures. Unlike people in individualisticcultures, who tend to emphasize independence, peoplein collectivistic cultures see humans as being enmeshed in complexrelationships. This social perspective is especially pronounced in theEast Asian cultures of Korea, Japan, and China, where a person’ssense of self is highly dependent upon his or her social context (Nisbett& Masuda, 2003). Consequently, East Asians pay much closer attentionto the social context in which their own actions, and the actionsof others, occur (Chua & others, 2005).The Cultural Eye of the BeholderResearcher Hannah Faye Chua and her colleagues (2005) haveshown that these cultural differences in social perspective influencevisual perception and memory. Study the photo on theright for a few seconds. Was most of your attention focused onthe tiger? Or was it focused on the tiger’s surroundings?Using sophisticated eye-tracking equipment, Chua and hercolleagues monitored the eye movements of U.S. and Chinesestudents while they looked at similar photographs that showeda single focal object against a realistic, complex background. Theresults showed that their eye movements differed: The U.S.students looked sooner and longer at the focal object in theforeground than the Chinese students. In contrast, the Chinesestudents spent more time looking at the background thanthe U. S. students. And, the Chinese were also less likely to recognizethe foreground objects when they were placed in front ofa new background.According to Chua and her colleagues (2005), the results reflectthe more “holistic” perceptual style that characterizes collectivisticcultures. Rather than separating the object from its background,the Chinese students tended to see—and remember—object andbackground as a single perceptual image. Other research has producedsimilar findings (Miyamoto & others, 2006; Nisbett &Masuda, 2003).Which do you notice—the tiger or its rocky surroundings?making absolute judgments that required them to ignore the context.Essentially, all participants had to work harder at making perceptualjudgments that were outside their cultural comfort zones.The bottom line? People from different cultures use the sameneural processes to make perceptual judgments. But, as JohnGabrieli (2008) points out, “they are trained to use them in differentways, and it’s the culture that does the training. The wayin which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, ina predictable way, how the individual thinks about independentor interdependent social relationships.” People from different culturesmay not literally see the world differently—but they noticedifferent things and think differently about what they do see.Relative TaskAbsolute TaskCultural Comfort Zones and Brain FunctioningDo these cultural differences in social and perceptual style influencebrain function? Psychologist Trey Hedden and his colleagues (2008)compared brain functioning in East Asian and U.S. participants whilethey made rapid perceptual judgments comparing two images of asquare with an embedded line as shown in this image at right.The relative task involved determining if the lines in the twoimages were in the same proportion to the surrounding squares. Theabsolute task involved determining whether the two lines were thesame absolute length, regardless of the size of the squares (seefigure). Each participant made these judgments while their brainactivity was tracked by an fMRI scanner.Both groups were equally proficient at the task and used thesame brain regions in making the simple perceptual judgments.However, the pattern of brain activation differed.The individualistic U. S. participants showed greater brain activationwhile making relative judgments, meaning they had to exertmore mental effort. The collectivistic East Asians showed theopposite pattern. The East Asians devoted greater brain effort toEast AsiansAmericansRelative task: Is the proportionof the vertical line to the box thesame in both images?Absolute task: Is the absolutelength of the two vertical lines thesame?