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Eye movements may betray your culture
Aug. 22, 2005
Courtesy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
and World Science staff
Your eye movements may reveal something about your cultural background, researchers have found, in a study comparing the way Easterners and Westerners look at photos.
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Sample map of a Chinese viewer's gaze on a
photograph.
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Sample map of an American viewer's gaze on
a photograph. (Courtesy PNAS)
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The scientists not only analyzed participants’ eye movements, but mapped them onto the photos themselves, using lines. They
found that Chinese and American people tend to move their eyes over the photos in distinctly different patterns.
Previous studies have revealed differences in thought processes between cultures: North Americans tend to be analytical and pay more attention to
foreground objects, while East Asians tend to be more holistic and rely on contextual information.
In the new study, Richard Nisbett and colleagues at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., studied the differences in how these groups actually look at the world.
The researchers measured eye movements of 45 American and Chinese students looking at photographs that had a single foreground object and a complex background; for example, a tiger by a stream.
Cultural differences emerged within the first second of viewing, the researchers reported: American students looked at the
foreground object more quickly and fixated on it longer than did Chinese students, while Chinese students made more
quick glances to the background.
These results suggest previously reported cultural differences in thought processes may be related to variations in what people
focus on as they view a scene, the researchers said. They speculated that these variations may reflect greater importance of context and social interrelationships in East Asian culture compared with Western culture.
The paper appears in this week’s early online edition of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
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