New research confirms that people from different national cultures vary in how they perceive their physical worlds. The specific findings of the study discussed here are not as important as the determination that cultural variations exist.
A research team lead by Yoshiyuki Ueda of Kyoto University reports that “an ability to perceive differences between similar images depends on the cultural background of the viewer. Scientists have long recognized that the mental processes behind thinking and reasoning differ between people raised in Western and Eastern cultures. Those in the West tend to use ‘analytical’ processing – analyzing objects independently of context – while those in the East see situations and objects as a whole, which is known as ‘holistic’ processing…In looking for the one odd line out of a group, North Americans took more time when the line was shorter, rather than if it was longer. No such differences were seen in Japanese volunteers, who in contrast had a significantly harder time identifying a straight line among tilted ones.”
Jun Saiki of Kyoto University adds that “’Our next step is to find the cause of this discrepancy. One such reason may be the orthographical [writing] systems the subjects see regularly. In East Asian writing, many characters are distinguished by subtle differences in stroke length, while in Western alphabets, slight angular alterations in letters result in remarkable changes in the reading of words.’”
The paper detailing these findings is published in Cognitive Science.
“You Don’t See What I see?” 2017. Press release, Kyoto University, http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/news/
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.