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；他们把注意力集中在一个物体上，根据它的属性对它进行分类，并应用规则来预测和解释它的行为。东亚人以一种相对整体的方式来感知和推理；他们同时关注客体和情境，关注事件之间的关系，并根据客体和情境之间假定的关系来预测和解释行为。与东亚参与者相比，西方参与者a)较少注意上下文，b)不太擅长检测事件之间的共变，c)更容易将物体与它们所嵌入的上下文分开，d)更容易错误地将行为完全归因于物体，而忽略了上下文因素的作用，e)不太容易受到后见之明偏见（“我一直都知道”错误）的影响。F)更有可能根据规则和类别来组织对象和事件，而不是根据关系和相似性；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特征。我们发现亚裔美国人更像欧洲人，而不是亚洲人。拟议的研究将探索感知差异的广度，包括它们是否延伸到听音以及它们是否影响学习过程；知觉差异的深度，包括可控与自动的程度，是否会导致东方人和西方人产生不同的知觉错觉，是否包括周边视觉能力的差异；感知差异有多统一；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感知和认知功能。该研究预计将表明，有利于整体思考者的教育实践可能与有利于分析思考者的教育实践不同；“文化公平”的能力测试可能是一个虚幻的目标；而且，感知和思维方式的差异很大，工作小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.