Related article: Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view scene. A growing literature suggests that people from different cultures have differing cognitive processing styles (1, 2) Westerners, in particular North Americans, tend to be more analytic than East Asians. That is, North Americans attend to focal objects more than do East Asians, analyzing their attributes and assigning them to categories. In contrast, East Asians have been held to be more holistic than Westerners and are more likely to attend to contextual information and make judgments based on relationships and similarities. --------------------------- Causal Allopurinol 30 Mg attributions for events reflect these differences in analytic vs. holistic thought. For example, Westerners tend to explain events in terms that refer primarily or entirely to salient objects (including people) whereas East Asians are more inclined to explain events in terms of contextual factors (3-5) There also are Allopurinol Price differences in performance on perceptual judgment and memory tasks (6-8) For example, Masuda and Nisbett (6) asked participants to report what they saw in underwater scenes. Americans Allopurinol 400 Mg emphasized focal objects, that is, large, brightly Allopurinol 200 Mg colored, rapidly moving objects. Japanese reported 60% more information about the background (e.g. rocks, color of water, small nonmoving objects) than did Americans. After viewing scenes containing single animal against realistic background, Japanese and American participants were asked to make old/new recognition judgments for animals in a new series of pictures. Sometimes the Allopurinol 100 Mg Tablet focal animal was Buy Allopurinol shown against the original background; other times the focal animal was shown against a new background. Japanese and Americans were equally accurate in detecting the focal animal when it was presented in its original background. However, Americans were more accurate than East Asians when the animal was displayed against new background. plausible interpretation is that, compared with Americans, the Japanese encoded Allopurinol 300 Mg Tablets the scenes more holistically, binding information about the objects with the backgrounds, so that the unfamiliar new background adversely affected the retrieval of the familiar animal. The difference in attending to objects vs. context also was shown in perceptual judgment task, the Rod and Frame test (7) American and Chinese participants looked down long box. At the end of the box was rod whose orientation could be changed and frame around the rod that could be moved independently of the rod. The participants? task was to judge when the rod was vertical. Chinese participants? judgments of verticality were more dependent on the context, in that their judgments were more influenced by the position of the frame than were those of American participants. In change blindness study, Masuda and Nisbett asked American and Japanese participants to view sequence of still photos and also to view animated vignettes of complex visual scenes (unpublished data) Changes in focal object information (e.g. color and shape of foregrounded objects) and contextual information (e.g. location of Allopurinol 100 Mg background details) were introduced during the sequence of presentations. Overall, the Japanese reported more changes in the contextual details than did the Americans, whereas the Americans reported more changes in the focal objects than did the Japanese. This finding has at least two possible explanations (see ref. 9) On one account, the Asian participants had more detailed mental representations of the backgrounds, whereas the Westerners had more detailed representations of the focal objects. On the other account, the mental representations did not differ with culture, but the two groups differed in their accuracy for detecting deviation between their mental representation of the background/focal object and the current stimulus. Clearly, there were systematic differences between the Americans? and the East Asians? performance in the causal perception, memory, and judgment studies. However, it is unclear whether the effects occur at the level of encoding, retrieval, mental comparison, or differences in reporting bias. To identify the stages in perceptual-cognitive processing at which the cultural differences might arise, consider what is known about scene perception:(i) Within 100ms of first viewing a scene, people can often encode the gist of the scene, e.g. "picnic" or "building" (10) (ii) People then construct mental model of the scene in working memory (11). The mental representation is not an exact rendering of the original scene and is usually incomplete in detail (12-13).(iii) Although the initial eye fixation may not be related to the configuration of the scene, the following fixations are to the most informative regions of the scene for the task at hand (14) The fixation positions are important because foveated regions are likely to been coded in greater detail than peripheral regions (15) (iv) The mental representation of the scene is then transferred to and consolidated in long-term memory. (v) Successful