Culture shapes how we look: Comparison between Chinese and African university students

Abstract

Previous cross-cultural studies have found that cultures can shape eye movement during scene perception, but those researches have been limited to the West. This study recruited Chinese and African students to document cultural effects on two phases of scene perception. In the free-viewing phase, Africans fixated more on the focal objects than Chinese, while Chinese paid more attention to the backgrounds than Africans especially on the fourth and fifth fixations. In the recognition phase, there was no cultural difference in perception, but Chinese recognized more objects than Africans. We conclude that cultural differences exist in scene perception when there is no explicit task and more clearly in its later period, and that some differences may be hidden in deeper processes (e.g., memory) during an explicit task.