perceptive differences between Asian and European Americans

One study noted observable differences between native Chinese people and European American people. Not to overgeneralize, what may have been observed among the Chinese may not apply to all Asians.

Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students — 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese — to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

“They literally are seeing the world differently,” said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

“Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do,” he said in a telephone interview. “They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can’t afford it.”

. . . Reinforcing the belief that the differences are cultural, he said, when Asians raised in North America were studied, they were intermediate between native Asians and European-Americans, and sometimes closer to Americans in the way they viewed scenes.

Read entire article at Wired News: In Asia, the Eyes Have It. [ht: Brad Boydston]

Abstract about the study, Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception, is online. Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Full text (PDF) costs $10 to access online.