MSNBC: Asians, North Americans see world differently

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9045003/

Asians, North Americans see world differently

Eye movements tracked to see where different groups focus in on photos

The Associated Press

Updated: 8:28 p.m. ET Aug. 22, 2005

 

 

WASHINGTON - 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. "

 

The findings are reported in Tuesday's issue of

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony,

Nisbett said, while in the West the key is

finding ways to get things done, paying less

attention to others.

 

And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and

economy of times thousands of years ago.

 

In ancient China, farmers developed a system of

irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers

had to get along with each other to share water

and make sure no one cheated.

 

Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed

in ancient Greece where there were more people

running individual farms, raising grapes and

olives, and operating like individual businessmen.

 

So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.

 

Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A

rock sank in water because it had the property of

gravity, wood floated because it had the property

of floating. He would not have mentioned the

water. The Chinese, though, considered all

actions related to the medium in which they

occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism

long before the West did.

 

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking

Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of

underwater scenes and report what they saw.

 

The Americans would go straight for the brightest

or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as

three trout swimming. The Japanese were more

likely to say they saw a stream, the water was

green, there were rocks on the bottom and then

mention the fish.

 

The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on

the background and twice as much about the

relationship between background and foreground

objects as Americans, Nisbett said.

 

In the latest test, the researchers tracked the

eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they

looked at pictures.

 

The Americans looked at the object in the

foreground sooner - a leopard in the jungle for

example - and they looked at it longer. The

Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the

background and back and forth between the main

object and the background, he said.

 

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.

 

Kyle R. Cave of the University of Massachusetts

at Amherst commented: " These results are

particularly striking because they show that

these cultural differences extend to low level

perceptual processes such as how we control our

eyes. They suggest that the way that we see and

explore the world literally depends on where we

come from. "

 

Cave said researchers in his lab have found

differences in eye movement between Asians and

Westerners in reading, based on differences in

the styles of writing in each language.

 

" When you look beyond this study to all of the

studies finding cultural differences, you find

that people from one culture do better on some

tasks, while people from other cultures do better

on others. I think it would be hard to argue from

these studies that one culture is generally

outperforming the other cognitively, " Cave said.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights

reserved. This material may not be published,

broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

© 2005 MSNBC.com

 

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9045003/

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