Culture and Change blindness

Change blindness is a phenomena in visual perception, where a person viewing a visual scene fails to detect changes in the scene. These change can be quite minor, like the presence or absence of objects in a still picture, or they can be surprisingly big, like the study done by Simons and Levin (1998). Change blindness seems like yet another perceptual/attentional dimension where East Asians and Westerners might be expected to behave differently.

Following the analytic/holistic paradigm, Masuda and Nisbett (2006) hypothesized that East Asians, being more sensitive to contextual cues, might be more sensitive (i.e. less blind) to changes in the background, while Americans might be more sensitive to changes in the objects in the foreground.

And this was indeed what they found. When shown flickering still pictures (like the one linked to above and figure 1 to the left), Americans took significantly less time to notice changes in the focal objects than changes in the background, but was not true of Japanese participants, who were slightly faster at recognizing background changes. This pattern of change blindness was replicated with moving images as well. All things considered, these are rather pedestrian results, just another point for the Hol/Anal paradigm.

The researchers then repeated the still image experiment, replacing some of the images with scenes of what might be seen in Japan (figure 6 to the right) In addition to the cultural origins of the vignettes, there are different in one specific physical characteristic: the American scenes were object-oriented: there were relatively few objects with salient features and the background was relatively simple; whereas the Japanese scenes were more context-oriented: there were many objects that were difficult to distinguish from the background. Masuda and Nisbett hypothesized that environmental characteristics of different cultures serve to direct and focus people’s attention differently. The results replicated previous studies: Americans still detected more focal object changes and that Japanese still detected more background changes. However, both Americans and Japanese detected more focal object changes in American scenes, and more background changes in Japanese scenes.

As I was reading the paper, I thought that this part sounded suspiciously like just a plug for yet another study by Miyamoto, Nisbett, and Masuda (2006). The scenes were photo-shopped to be object/context-oriented and were not organic scenes from different cultures. It should not be surprising that both American and Japanese participants detected more focal object changes in object-oriented scenes, and background changes in context-oriented scenes–this is the strongest conclusion this study could made.

Unsatisfied? Read the Miyamoto-Nisbett-Masuda follow up paper! It’s a gem.

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Masuda T., & Nisbett, R.E. (2006) Culture and Change Blindness. Cognitive Science 30, 381-399

Miyamoto, Y., Nisbett, R.E., & Masuda, T. (2006) Culture and the Physical Environment: Holistic versus Analytic perceptual affordances Psychological Science, 17(2), 113-119

Simons, D.J., & Levin, D.T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people in a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 644-649.