Cultural Differences in Allocation of Attention in Visual Information Processing

Previous research has shown that when processing visual scenes, Westerners attend to salient objects and East Asians attend to the relationships between focal objects and background elements. It is possible that cross-cultural differences in attentional allocation contribute to these earlier findings. In this article, the authors investigate cultural differences in attentional allocation in two experiments, using a visual change detection paradigm. They demonstrate that East Asians are better than Americans at detecting color changes when a layout of a set of colored blocks is expanded to cover a wider region and worse when it is shrunk. East Asians are also slower than Americans are at detecting changes in the center of the screen. The data suggest that East Asians allocate their attention more broadly than Americans. The authors consider potential factors that may contribute to the development of such attention allocation differences.