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When Is Perception Top‐Down and When Is It Not? Culture, Narrative, and Attention
Author(s) -
Senzaki Sawa,
Masuda Takahiko,
Ishii Keiko
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.12118
Subject(s) - narrative , meaning (existential) , psychology , perception , task (project management) , social psychology , cultural diversity , cognitive psychology , sociology , linguistics , anthropology , philosophy , management , neuroscience , economics , psychotherapist
Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, [Nisbett, R. E., 2003]). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross‐cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.