Visual attention across cultures: Similarities and differences in child development and maternal attention styles

Previous cross-cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context-sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the field is that attention styles are gradually socialized in culture-specific interactions in childhood, empirical evidence for the proximal mechanisms underlying this development is scarce. This study aimed to document the emergence of cross-cultural differences in attention styles in three cultural contexts differing in social orientations, namely in urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany (i.e., more independent context), and Kyoto, Japan, and Indigenous-heritage families from Cotacachi, Ecuador (i.e., more interdependent contexts). Furthermore, to test the assumption that caregivers' attention guidance is one of the forces driving differential development, we investigated how caregivers guide children's attention. In total, 270 children between 4 and 9 years of age and their mothers participated in three tasks: an eye-tracking task, a picture description task and a forced-choice recognition task. Results indicate a mixed pattern of findings: While some tasks revealed the expected cultural differences, namely a higher object focus in Münster compared to Kyoto and Cotacachi, others did not. Regarding caregivers' attention guidance, we found that mothers in Münster more strongly emphasized the focal object than mothers in Kyoto and Cotacachi. The results are discussed in terms of culture-specific developmental trajectories and the generalizability of attentional processes across tasks and cultural contexts. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We investigated visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children and their mothers from urban Germany, urban Japan, and rural Ecuador in three different tasks. Special emphasis lied on mothers' verbal attention guidance toward their children as a proximal mechanism underlying the emergence of culture-specific attention styles. Mothers from urban Germany guided their children's attention in more analytic ways than mothers from urban Japan and rural Ecuador. The relevance of verbal attention guidance in the development of culture-specific attention styles has been demonstrated beyond the East-West dichotomy.