Cultural differences in spatial frequency tunings to faces do not generalize to visual scenes and object stimuli

Previous research has identified cultural differences in visual perception, where East Asians focus more on global object structure and display a larger breadth of attention compared with Westerners. East Asians rely on lower spatial frequencies (SFs) compared to Westerners for face recognition, which may be linked to this. Investigating whether such differences extend to other high-level stimulus categories would clarify if SF tuning differences reflect more general or face specific cognitive processes. The present study compared the SF tunings of Canadians and Chinese during object (Exp. 1; N = 50) and scene (Exp. 3; N = 47) categorization. In both experiments, results did not indicate a significant difference between groups. In Experiment 3 (N = 128), we conducted an online replication of Experiment 1 while measuring the SF tunings of the same participants during face perception. Again, no significant difference between the groups was found during object categorization, but the finding that East Asians rely on lower SF than Westerners was replicated. Together, these results suggest that unique mechanisms may underlie the cultural differences in face processing, though alternative explanations, such as the feature consistency of faces, could also account for these findings.