Cultural Shades Prompt Us to Focus on Different Things
By Carey Goldberg / Boston Globe
East is East and West is West, and the difference between them is starting to turn up even on brain scanners. Brain research is adding high-tech evidence to what lower-tech psychology experiments have found for years: Culture can affect not just language and custom, but how people experience the world at stunningly basic levels - what they see when they look at a city street, for example, or even how they perceive a simple line in a square.
Western culture, they have found, conditions people to think of themselves as highly independent entities. And when looking at scenes, Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings. In contrast, East Asian cultures stress interdependence. When Easterners take in a scene, they tend to focus more on the context as well as the object: the whole block, say, rather than the BMW parked in the foreground
Read the article Cultural Insights
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