Group-level differences in visual search
asymmetry
Emily S. Cramer, Michelle J. Dusko, and Ronald
A. Rensink
University of British Columbia
Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, 78: 1585-1602.
[web]
East Asians and
Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. For example,
visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more
influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for
Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett in Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922–934, 2001). There are also
differences in visual search: For Westerners, search is faster for a long line
among short ones than for a short line among long ones, whereas this difference
does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al., 2016). However, it is
unclear how these group-level differences originate. To investigate the extent
to which they depend upon environment, we tested visual search and visual
memory in East Asian immigrants who had lived in Canada for different amounts
of time. Recent immigrants were found to exhibit no search asymmetry, unlike
Westerners who had spent their lives in Canada. However, immigrants who had
lived in Canada for more than 2 years showed performance comparable to that of
Westerners. These differences could not be explained by the general
analytic/holistic processing distinction believed to differentiate Westerners
and East Asians, since all observers showed a strong holistic tendency for
visual recognition. The results instead support the suggestion that exposure to
a new environment can significantly affect the particular processes used to
perceive a given stimulus.