Cultural Differences in Cognitive Processing Style: Evidence from Eye Movements During Scene Processing

The present study provided a partial replication of an influential study by Chua, Boland, and Nisbett (2005). By tracking the eye movements of North American and Chinese students when viewing pictures of naturalistic scenes, both studies demonstrated that the North American students fixated more on the focal object in the scene, whereas the Chinese students fixated more on the background. However, these cultural biases in viewing patterns did not appear to be related to later object-recognition performance in the present study, whereas they were in the Chua et al. study