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Visual perception may depend on birthplace and environment -- Sci... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523095013.

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Visual perception may depend on birthplace and


environment
Date: May 23, 2017

Source: Kyoto University

Summary: Researchers shows that an ability to perceive dierences between similar images depends on
the cultural background of the viewer.

FULL STORY

Perhaps we only see what we've learned to see.

In a recent multinational study in the journal Cognitive Science, a research team led by Kyoto University
shows that an ability to perceive dierences between similar images depends on the cultural background of
the viewer.

Scientists have long recognized that the mental processes behind thinking and reasoning dier between
people raised in Western and Eastern cultures. Those in the West tend to use 'analytical' processing --
analyzing objects independently of context -- while those in the East see situations and objects as a whole,
which is known as 'holistic' processing.

While such dierences in processing are thought to aect visual perception, lead author Yoshiyuki Ueda of
Kyoto University believes that this view is overly simplistic.

"Reports about the eects of cultural dierences on visual perception are inconsistent," says Ueda. "Partly,
previous experiments have used relatively complex objects, resulting in a lot of 'noise'. We decided to
simplify the visual task by using simple geometric figures."

Volunteers from Canada, the United States, and Japan were asked to look at groups of objects such as
straight lines with varying properties and discern simple dierences between them: angle and length, for
example. In looking for the one odd line out of a group, North Americans took more time when the line was
shorter, rather than if it was longer. No such dierences were seen in Japanese volunteers, who in contrast
had a significantly harder time identifying a straight line among tilted ones.

Such a stimulus-dependent cultural dierence cannot be explained simply by analytic-holistic theory.

"There are likely other dierences in perceptional mechanisms that caused this discrepancy in visual
processing," continues senior researcher Jun Saiki of Kyoto University. "Our next step is to find the cause of
this discrepancy. One such reason may be the orthographical systems the subjects see regularly.

"In East Asian writing, many characters are distinguished by subtle dierences in stroke length, while in

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Visual perception may depend on birthplace and environment -- Sci... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523095013.htm

Western alphabets, slight angular alterations in letters result in remarkable changes in the reading of words."

The researchers eventually hope to gain insight into the role of visual experience in the development -- from
an early age -- of the visual processing system.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Kyoto University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Yoshiyuki Ueda, Lei Chen, Jonathon Kopecky, Emily S. Cramer, Ronald A. Rensink, David E. Meyer,
Shinobu Kitayama, Jun Saiki. Cultural Dierences in Visual Search for Geometric Figures. Cognitive
Science, 2017; DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12490

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ScienceDaily, 23 May 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523095013.htm>.

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