EAPSI: Investigating how Social Values, Language, and Physical Environment Explain Differences in how People in Japan and the United States Look at Visual Scenes

Spevack Samuel C, Merced CA

Investigators

Abstract

While people both in Japan and the United States are more likely to attend to objects in the foreground than the background of a visual scene, several studies show that people in the United States attend more to objects in the foreground than people in Japan. This difference has profound effects on how people interact with others and their surroundings. The underlying reasons for this difference are unexplored. Possible explanations include differences in social values (e.g. group cohesion vs. self-independence), language background (e.g. English vs. Japanese) or physical environment (e.g. the way buildings and roads are structured in Japan vs. the U.S.). This award supports research to explore how these factors influence differences between the visual attention of people in Japan and the United States. The work will be performed in collaboration with Dr. Jun Saiki, an expert in vision science at Kyoto University. To explore the underlying causes for visual attention differences between people in Japan and the United States, the fellow will conduct an eye-tracking experiment. The experiment will measure the eye movements of people living in Japan as they look at visual scenes. The experiment will assess each individual's alignment towards individualism-collectivism, linguistic background, and their familiarity with particular physical layouts of cities in Japan and the United States. The data collected from participants in Japan will be compared to results from participants in the United States. By assessing how individual scores on measures of individualism-collectivism, language background, and physical environment familiarity predict differences in attention, this research will contribute to the understanding of how the interaction of these large-scale cultural factors modulate the visual attention preferences of individuals. This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.