EAPSI: Investigating how Social Values, Language, and Physical Environment Explain Differences in how People in Japan and the United States Look at Visual Scenes

虽然日本人和美国人都更倾向于关注前景中的物体，而不是视觉场景的背景，但几项研究表明，美国人比日本人更关注前景中的物体。这种差异对人们如何与他人和周围环境互动有着深远的影响。造成这种差异的根本原因尚不清楚。可能的解释包括社会价值观的差异（如群体凝聚力与自我独立），语言背景（如英语与日语）或物理环境（如日本与美国的建筑和道路结构）。该奖项支持研究这些因素如何影响日本人和美国人视觉注意力的差异。这项工作将与京都大学视觉科学专家Jun Saiki博士合作进行。为了探索日本人和美国人视觉注意力差异的潜在原因，这位研究员将进行一项眼球追踪实验。这项实验将测量居住在日本的人们在观看视觉场景时的眼球运动。该实验将评估每个人对个人主义-集体主义、语言背景以及他们对日本和美国城市特定物理布局的熟悉程度的一致性。从日本参与者那里收集的数据将与美国参与者的结果进行比较。通过评估个体在个人主义-集体主义、语言背景和自然环境熟悉度方面的得分如何预测注意差异，本研究将有助于理解这些大规模文化因素如何相互作用调节个体的视觉注意偏好。该奖项隶属于东亚和太平洋暑期研究所项目，由美国国家科学基金会和日本科学促进会共同资助，支持一名美国研究生进行暑期研究。

While people both in Japan and the United States are more likely to attend to objects in the foreground than the background of a visual scene, several studies show that people in the United States attend more to objects in the foreground than people in Japan. This difference has profound effects on how people interact with others and their surroundings. The underlying reasons for this difference are unexplored. Possible explanations include differences in social values (e.g. group cohesion vs. self-independence), language background (e.g. English vs. Japanese) or physical environment (e.g. the way buildings and roads are structured in Japan vs. the U.S.). This award supports research to explore how these factors influence differences between the visual attention of people in Japan and the United States. The work will be performed in collaboration with Dr. Jun Saiki, an expert in vision science at Kyoto University.To explore the underlying causes for visual attention differences between people in Japan and the United States, the fellow will conduct an eye-tracking experiment. The experiment will measure the eye movements of people living in Japan as they look at visual scenes. The experiment will assess each individual's alignment towards individualism-collectivism, linguistic background, and their familiarity with particular physical layouts of cities in Japan and the United States. The data collected from participants in Japan will be compared to results from participants in the United States. By assessing how individual scores on measures of individualism-collectivism, language background, and physical environment familiarity predict differences in attention, this research will contribute to the understanding of how the interaction of these large-scale cultural factors modulate the visual attention preferences of individuals. This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.