is what i do

Wired Magazine reports on a fascinating study by a couple of vision researchers, who measured eye movements in American, Japanese and Chinese college students while looking at photographs. The Americans latched onto the foreground object in the scene and focused on that, while the Asian students spent much more time scanning the background, taking in the whole scene. The researchers believe they are seeing cultural differences:

I think that these folks are definitely onto something—something that may explain a lot of different things, including the fiasco of the Vietnamese war, the miraculous recovery of Japan after the Second World War, the current rapid decline in US technological superiority, and the likelihood that China will emerge as the dominant nation in the world much more quickly than anyone here expects.

The fact is, that we have lost sight completely of the many virtues inherent in harmony; all we see when we look at a nation working in harmony is a coercive force at the top enforcing conformity. If we look for that in any harmonious society, of course, we will see it. But that’s not all there is to it. And our focus on the foreground prevents us from seeing the equally dangerous and dehumanizing dynamics enforcing conformity in our own society; we think of ourselves as rugged individualists, and of the Chinese and Japanese as herd-mentality communitarians, but that’s a false picture.

I hope that this research continues and extends to other cultures. I’d love to see, for example, how those photos are viewed by people raised in a tribal culture, or by people who have grown up in a traditional Islamic society.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.