Posted: Sep 29, 2010 12:15 pm
Interesting. The next step would be to include people from Eastern cultures/religions and adjust for that variable. It appears that we Westerners tend to focus on the individual objects within a picture. This would mean that the lifelong atheists in the study above display the less frequent type of attention bias.
There is evidence that the collectivist nature of East Asian cultures versus individualistic Western cultures affects both brain and behavior. East Asians tend to process information in a global manner whereas Westerners tend to focus on individual objects. There are differences between East Asians and Westerners with respect to attention, categorization, and reasoning. For example, in one study, after viewing pictures of fish swimming, Japanese volunteers were more likely to remember contextual details of the image than were American volunteers. Experiments tracking participants' eye movements revealed that Westerners spend more time looking at focal objects while Chinese volunteers look more at the background. In addition, our culture may play a role in the way we process facial information. Research has indicated that when viewing faces, East Asians focus on the central region of faces while Westerners look more broadly, focusing on both the eyes and mouth.
Westerners have thicker frontal cortexes for reasoning whereas East Asians have thicker cortex areas for perception.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/med ... 0/park.cfm