Cognition East and West: Attention, Categorization and Reasoning for East Asians and European Americans

在之前的研究中，PI发现欧洲文化的人倾向于以相对分析的方式感知和推理;他们将注意力集中在一个物体上，根据其属性对其进行分类，并应用规则来预测和解释其行为。东亚人以相对整体的方式感知和推理;他们同时关注对象和背景，他们关注事件之间的关系，他们根据对象和背景之间的假定关系来预测和解释行为。与东亚参与者相比，西方参与者a）对上下文的注意较少，B）在检测事件之间的协变方面的技能较低，c）发现更容易将对象与它们嵌入的上下文分开，d）更容易错误地将行为专门归因于对象，而忽略上下文因素的作用，e）不太容易受到事后诸葛亮偏见（“我知道一切沿着”错误）的影响，f）更有可能根据规则和类别而不是关系和相似性来组织对象和事件，g）更有可能将逻辑规则应用于描述日常情况的问题。这些差异的根源可能在于东西方不同的社会制度。我们发现亚裔美国人更像欧洲人而不是亚洲人。本研究将探讨知觉差异的广度，包括知觉差异是否延伸到听觉以及知觉差异是否影响学习过程;知觉差异的深度，包括知觉差异的可控性和自动性，是否导致东西方人不同的知觉错觉，以及知觉差异是否包括周边视觉能力的差异;知觉差异的统一性如何;知觉的个体差异是否与认知的个体差异有关;以及社会因素如何影响知觉和认知功能。这项研究预计将表明，有利于整体思维者的教育实践可能与有利于分析思维者的教育实践不同;“文化公平”能力测试可能是一个虚幻的目标;感知和思维方式差异很大，工作组中的种族多样性可能会改善解决问题的能力。

In previous research, the PI found that people of European culture tend to perceive and reason in a relatively analytic way; they focus their attention on an object, categorize it on the basis of its attributes, and apply rules to predict and explain its behavior. East Asians perceive and reason in a relatively holistic way; they attend to the object and the context simultaneously, they are attentive to relationships among events, and they predict and explain behavior on the basis of presumed relationships between object and context. Compared to East Asian participants, Western participants a) notice less about the context, b) are less skilled at detecting covariation among events, c) find it easier to separate objects from the contexts in which they are embedded, d) are more likely to mistakenly attribute behavior exclusively to the object while ignoring the role of contextual factors, e) are less susceptible to the hindsight bias (the "I-knew-it-all-along" error), f) more likely to organize objects and events in terms of rules and categories as opposed to relationships and similarities, and g) are more likely to apply logical rules to problems describing everyday situations. The origins of these differences probably lie in the different social systems characteristic of East and West. We find that Asian Americans resemble European Americans more than they do Asians. The proposed research will explore the breadth of the perceptual differences, including whether they extend to audition and whether they influence learning processes; the depth of the perceptual differences, including how controllable vs. automatic they are, whether they result in different perceptual illusions for Easterners and Westerners, and whether they include differences in peripheral vision capacity; how unified the perceptual differences are; whether individual differences in perception are related to individual differences in cognition; and how social factors affect perceptual and cognitive functioning. The research is expected to indicate that educational practices that benefit holistic thinkers may not be the same ones that benefit analytic thinkers; that "culture fair" ability testing may be an illusory goal; and that perceptual and thinking styles are sufficiently different that ethnic diversity in work groups is likely to improve problem-solving.