[Effect of contextual factors on patterns of eye-movement: comparing sensitivity to background information between Japanese and Westerners].

Recent cross-cultural research suggests that East Asians are more likely than their Western counterparts to be sensitive to contextual information. In this experimental research study, we presented a blinking circle situated at the center of the computer screen for 30s. Both Japanese and Western participants were alternately engaged in two different tasks: (a) A single target circle, and (b) a target circle with four surrounding circles. In either case, they were asked to focus only on the target circle while ignoring the surrounding information. The results indicated that, even though the Japanese attempted to focus on the center circle, they failed to focus only on the center circle. Their number of fixations and variances from the center to each fixation points were significantly larger than found with the Westerners. This effect was stronger when four circles surrounded the target circle compared to a single circle. These findings suggest that cultural influences on basic psychological processes may be very deep.

How much information? East Asian and North American cultural products and information search performance.

Literature in cultural psychology suggests that compared with North Americans, East Asians prefer context-rich cultural products (e.g., paintings and photographs). The present article further examines the preferred amount of information in cultural products produced by East Asians and North Americans (Study 1: Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference posters; Study 2: government and university portal pages). The authors found that East Asians produced more information-rich products than did North Americans. Study 3 further examined people's information search speed when identifying target objects on mock webpages containing large amounts of information. The results indicated that East Asians were faster than North Americans in dealing with information on mock webpages with large amounts of information. Finally, the authors found that there were cultural differences as well as similarities in functional and aesthetic preferences regarding styles of information presentation. The interplay between cultural products and skills for accommodating to the cultural products is discussed.

Do surrounding figures' emotions affect judgment of the target figure's emotion? Comparing the eye-movement patterns of European Canadians, Asian Canadians, Asian international students, and Japanese.

Although the effect of context on cognition is observable across cultures, preliminary findings suggest that when asked to judge the emotion of a target model's facial expression, East Asians are more likely than their North American counterparts to be influenced by the facial expressions of surrounding others (Masuda et al., 2008b). Cultural psychologists discuss this cultural variation in affective emotional context under the rubric of holistic vs. analytic thought, independent vs. interdependent self-construals, and socially disengaged vs. socially engaged emotion (e.g., Mesquita and Markus, 2004). We demonstrate that this effect is generalizable even when (1) photos of real facial emotions are used, (2) the saliency of the target model's emotion is attenuated, and (3) a specific amount of observation time is allocated. We further demonstrate that the experience plays an important role in producing cultural variations in the affective context effect on cognition.