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

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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.