Asians and Westerners really see things differently

Fri, Mar 07, 2008
The Straits Times

BOSTON - CULTURE can affect not just language and customs, but also how people experience the world at stunningly basic levels, new brain research has revealed.
Brain scans support surprising differences in perception between Westerners and Asians - what they see when they look at a city street, for example, or even how they perceive a simple line in a square, according to findings published in the Psychological Science journal.

Western culture conditions people to think of themselves as highly independent entities, the researchers found, said a report in the Boston Globe.

And when looking at scenes, Westerners tend to focus more on central objects than on their surroundings.

In contrast, East Asian cultures stress interdependence. When Easterners take in a scene, they tend to focus on the context as well as the object.
Dr Denise Park of the Centre for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas used a camera analogy to explain the results of the research.

'The Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic...the Easterner probably sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail,' she was quoted as saying in the Boston Globe.

The research, led by Dr Trey Hedden and Professor John Gabrieli of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed that such deeply ingrained habits of thought affect the brains of East Asians and Americans even as they perform simple tasks that involve estimating the length of a line.

Dr Hedden's experiment involved two tasks. In one, subjects looked at a line simply to estimate its length - a task that played to American strengths. In another, they estimated the line's length relative to the size of a square - an easier task for the Asians.

Brain scanners measured levels of neural activity by tracking blood flow. The experiment found that although there was no difference in performance - the tasks were very easy - the level of activity in the subjects' brains differed, suggesting different levels of effort.

Areas linked to attention lit up more in the Americans' brains when they worked on the task they tended to find harder: estimating the line's size relative to the square.

In Asians, too, the attention areas lit up more during the harder task: estimating the line's length without comparing it to the square.

The findings echoed more than a decade of previous experimental research into East-West differences.

For example, in one study, researchers offered people a choice among five pens: four red and one green. Easterners were likelier to choose a red pen, while Westerners more often chose the green.

In an experiment measuring how well eight-year-olds could solve puzzles, American children performed best when solving puzzles they had chosen themselves, while Asian children performed best when solving puzzles they were told their mothers had chosen for them.

When they were tested on details of an underwater scene they recently viewed, Westerners tended to remember more about the biggest fish, while Easterners remembered more about the scene's background.

The new research promises to add new precision to the earlier work. In their study, Prof Gabrieli said, the scanning not only showed brain differences in the line-and-square task, it also allowed researchers to begin to ask how deep those differences go.

Based on what parts of the brain were activated during the tasks, Prof Gabrieli believed everyone sees the same thing, but may filter it differently.

'Culture is not changing how you see the world, but rather how you think and interpret.'

But such habits can sometimes change. Some initial psychological studies suggest that when an Easterner goes to the West or vice versa, habits of thought and perception quickly begin to change.