I recently read a research article that flipped the focus, as it were, of something I’ve been interested in for a while: how culture affects what we notice. In a paper published in in 2022 in Developmental Science, cultural psychologist Solveig Jurkat and four co-researchers conducted a study of visual attention style among mothers and children in three local cultures: Munster, Germany; Kyoto, Japan; and Cotacachi, Ecuador.
The researchers worked with 88 mother-child pairs in Munster, 95 in Kyoto, and 87 in the area around Cotacachi, having both the moms and kids try two types of tasks to investigate what they actually observed when looking at various scenes. The children’s ages ranged from four to nine, and all groups had slightly more girls than boys: 53% for Munster and Kyoto, and 62% for Cotacachi.
First, the children and the mothers each did two eye-tracking tasks. In the first, they were shown 10 familiar objects in (randomized) succession for four seconds each and told to look at the objects as they liked. The setting was very simple, for example, an apple shown in a plain background.
In the second, they saw 42 more pictures that included a slightly more elaborate background, like a horse in front of a field with a fence, again for four seconds each. The researchers tracked how long they looked at the main objects.
To rid the data of any situations in which the subjects’ attention was diverted from the task at hand, in any case in which a child or mother looked at the monitor for less than two seconds, the data was excluded. But most of the mothers and children managed to concentrate on the task, with at least 93% of the data for each group included. The researchers derived an average for each cultural group related to the time spent looking at the object relative to looking at the background, with a score of 1 indicating the child or mother only looked at the object and a score of 0 meaning they only looked at the background.
Among the children’s groups for the simple pictures, the Cotacachi children were the most focused on the object, followed by the Munster children and then the Kyoto children. For the complex picture, the order for the Cotacachi children and Munster children was reversed, but the Kyoto children still came last. For the adults, both the Cotacachi children and mothers were highest for the simple and complex pictures, with the Munster and Kyoto mothers spending about the same average time looking at the object in both types of pictures, which was significantly lower than that of the Cotacachi mothers.
The second type of task involved describing pictures. After practicing with three pictures, the children saw 12 pictures in randomized order for 15 seconds each. During this time, they were supposed to describe what they saw to the experimenter who sat across from them. When the mothers did the task, the children and mothers saw 12 pictures together and each mother described them to her child. What the children and mothers said in the two sets was slotted into three categories: referring to the object, referring to the background, or referring to the relation among various things.
The researchers tallied the frequency of object-related descriptive statements up to the first three references made – in the 15 seconds, some of the mothers and children said a lot, others not so much. Once again, both the Kyoto children and mothers were at the lowest frequency for focusing on the objects, but the Munster mothers were significantly more focused on the objects than their counterparts in the other two cultural groups.
The results of the study suggest that both the Kyoto moms and kids are less concentrated on the main object in a picture, compared to their cultural counterparts. When I wrote earlier that this research flipped the focus, it is because in 2001, Takahiko Masuda and Richard Nisbett published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that investigated how much different cultural groups pay attention to the background context.
Masuda and Nisbett showed 36 American students at the University of Michigan and 41 Japanese students at Kyoto University 10 animated clips of fish swimming in water, along with other objects, like vegetation, seashells, or bubbles. Each clip was 20 seconds in duration, and after the participants viewed the clips twice, they were asked to spend up to two minutes verbally describing what they had seen. Their responses were categorized as “focal fish”; “active animals” (other than the focal fish); “inert objects”, and “background”, like bubbles or the floor. On average, the Japanese students recalled more of each category, especially inert objects and background.
The researchers also recorded what was particularly mentioned in the first sentence each participant made in their description. Focal fish and active objects were considered “salient objects”, and inert objects and background were termed “field”. On average, the Americans were more likely to mention salient objects, and the Japanese participants were twice as likely to mention the field.
Masuda and Nisbett additionally noted the relationship between objects in the descriptions, specifically whether something was described in relation to an active animal or something in the field. The Japanese respondents made roughly the same average number of statements that described relationships to active animals, but they were twice as likely to mention a relationship with something in the field.
The findings of both research papers suggest that Japanese people are more likely to direct their attention to the background as well as the foreground compared to members of a variety of other cultures. For me, as a reader of the research articles, it was interesting to experience similar findings described conversely: the Japanese were less object-focused in the first paper, and more background-focused in the second. I felt drawn to considering the issue both ways, like my eyes confronting a reversible image, never out of context, just inverted to another context and another cultural way of viewing the world.
If I'm walking around in Japan, if I look at people coming the opposite way, this seems to indicate to them that I've seen them, and they don't need to change their walking trajectory to avoid a collision with me. When walking in the UK, I look at people walking the opposite way, and (if they're not looking at their smartphone) they look at me, and we mutually decide on trajectories to avoid each other. To avoid the irritation of people bumping into me in Japan therefore, I have to consciously focus on NOT looking at people coming the opposite way, and instead focus on the distant background. Is this just me?
Thank you for sharing this fact-based reference on cultural differences in how the brain prioritizes and processes visual stimuli. As I read it, I kept thinking about how most Japanese people seem to be unable to see the forest for the trees. There are, of course, notable exceptions, including many true visionaries, but in my experience this statement can generally be applied accurately to the typical Japanese person. The implied focus on details, sometimes called "the weeds" by Americans, can often lead to situations in Japan where certain people seem to be "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" when they should be paying more attention to the big picture. Perhaps your observations are related to this perceived phenomenon.