Research Design Connection: What We See

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | July 17th, 2017

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 …