Page 291 : What You See Is Where You’re From

{ 2008 01 12 }

What You See Is Where You’re From

Scientists at MIT report that East Asians with strong cultural affinities naturally pay more attention to visual context than Westerners, who focus more closely on individual objects within a visual context. This study is the latest in a number of studies (this one, for example) that attempt to chart how cultural backgrounds affect vision. It’s especially interesting because John Gabrieli and others have found that their results correlate with another test that demonstrates cultural affinities among subjects.

Posted by 291 on Saturday, January 12, 2008, at 4:16 pm, and filed under Visual Science, Pop Culture, Miscellany. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

Page 291 : Links: The Eye Of The Beholder | May 8, 2008 at 3:31 pm | Permalink

[…] This article from the London Times spotlights Dr. Beau Lotto, a scientist/artist whose work examines the fallibility of human visual perception. Lotto argues that optical illusions, far from being hardwired into the brain, are frequently the result of prior experience. While the illusions are fun, I’m not sure the article (or maybe even Dr. Lotto) presents any convincing argument that these visual “shortcuts” are learned…the closest the piece comes is a linguistic analogy about “L” and “R” in some Asian languages. That’s useful for illustrating the idea of culture affecting perception, but does nothing to prove any visual examples. Dr. Lotto needs to find examples where members of certain cultures don’t fall for such illusions because they’d have no applicability in their environment–a task that might prove very difficult, if not impossible. I think there’s some evidence for his ideas, though, in cross-cultural studies of color perception and studies about the ways Easterners and Westerners approach images. […]