This week’s classes caught my interest in our discussion of Alfred Yarbus’s work in the 1950s and 1960s on eye-tracking. In summary, Alfred Yarbus was a Russian psychologist who tracked observers’ eye movements as they moved around a scene. In class, we talked specifically about Yarbus’ study of “The Visitor” painting and how different prompts resulted in observers gazing and focusing on different parts of the painting. In addition to this, Yarbus also conducted several eye-tracking studies of observers looking at faces.
Yarbus’ work reminded me of another famous study about culture and point of view conducted several years later by Liang-Hwang Chiu (1972). Chiu examined how children from Western cultures (American) and Eastern cultures (Chinese) interpreted the same scene. Overall, they found that Westerners tended to perceive the world through rules of category membership while Easterners perceive the world through relational groupings of objects. In the study, Chiu had children from the West and from the East look at an image composed of three objects: a cow, a chicken, and grass. He then asked the participants to choose which of the two objects should go together. The Western children chose the cow and chicken because they were both animals while the Eastern children chose the cow and grass because cows eat grass.
After hearing about Yarbus’ work, I thus wondered if any of these cultural difference studies like Chiu’s used similar methods of eye-tracking? The answer is yes, there are several. For example, researchers Hannah Chua, Julie Boland, and Richard Nesbitt (2005) built upon the finding that Westerners pay attention to focal objects and Easterners to relations and context. Using eye-tracking of 36 images with objects in the foreground and realistic backgrounds, they found that American participants were quicker to local at the focal object and spent more time overall looking at it. In comparison, Chinese participants looked more at the background.
In a more recent study, researchers Jennifer Haensel, Tim Smith, and Atsushi Senju (2022) used eye-tracking to examine how Easterners and Westerners differed in their mutual gaze during dyadic social interactions. Contrary to the prior theory that Easterners are more likely to avoid gaze as a cultural normal than Westerners, this study found that Easterners had longer instances of mutual gaze during a story-telling task than Westerners.
Returning to Yarbus’ original work, it could be quite interesting to replicate this study using participants from different cultures. Specifically, I wonder what the eye-tracking results would be if Eastern and Western participants were asked questions while looking at the same scene, the differences in their answers, and their eye-tracking patterns to arrive at each answer.
Sources:
- Chiu, L.-H. (1972). A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Cognitive Styles in Chinese and American Children. International Journal of Psychology, 7, 235–242.
- Chua, H. F., Boland, J. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (2005). Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 102, 12629–12633.
- Haensel, J., Smith, T. J., & Senju, A. (2021). Cultural differences in mutual gaze during face-to-face interactions: A dual head-mounted eye-tracking study. Visual Cognition. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/pvis20/current
- Tatler, B. W., Wade, N. J., Kwan, H., Findlay, J. M., & Velichkovsky, B. M. (2010). Yarbus, eye movements, and vision. I-Perception, 1, 7–27.