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.
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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