Is Your Brain East or West?

By Alex in Science & Tech on Jul 14, 2010 at 1:16 am

It’s common knowledge that people from different culture act differently, but according to Takahiko Masuda of the University of Alberta, they think differently as well. For example, here’s how Westerners and Asians interpret the two pictures above:

“North Americans try to identify the single important thing that is key to making a decision,” explains Dr. Takahiko Masuda, the study’s author, over the phone from his office at the University of Alberta. “In East Asia they really care about the context.”

He studied the eye movement of Americans and Japanese when analyzing a picture of a group of cartoon people. When asked to interpret the emotion of the person in the center, the Japanese looked at the person for about one second before moving on to the people in the background. They needed to know how the group was feeling before understanding the emotion of the individual.

The Americans (and Canadians in subsequent studies) focused 95% of their attention on the person in the center. Only 5% of their attention was focused on the background, and this, Dr. Masuda points out, didn’t influence their interpretation of the central figure’s emotion. For North Americans the foreground is all-important.

Link – via Holy Kaw!


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  1. Rumson
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 6:02 am

    I noticed the people in the background almost instantly, and I’m from New Jersey. This is just another pointless generalization.

  2. yodelin_yuppie
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 6:19 am

    ah, multiculturalism. that means “drop your western way and assimilate the foreign”.

  3. jwlash
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 6:23 am

    I noticed the people in the background instantly, as well. I usually take in the scope of an image first. If I find something that interests me, I will look at it in detail afterward.

  4. Missbookworm
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 7:44 am

    I thought the study was what the central figure was feeling. In which case, I look at the central figure and disregard the group as a whole, even though I saw them just as quickly as I saw the central figure when I looked the first time. So yeah, I am a typical Western I guess.

    When asked “what is the number 2 jersey feeling?” do you honestly take everyone into account? They could be feeling different things. Like, maybe he smells bad in the second picture, and he’s oblivious.

  5. BenEshbach
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 9:08 am

    @Missbookworm: “When asked “what is the number 2 jersey feeling?” do you honestly take everyone into account?”

    Yes. Honestly.

  6. ted
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 9:43 am

    I think you would take them into account. The first picture looks like a team taht just won. The second picture looks like he just beat the others at something.

    I don’t think this proves what they’re claiming it proves.

  7. Kalel
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 10:14 am

    I still don’t see the gorilla.

  8. Superfly
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 10:55 am

    If those people in the background are frowning, then who cares? They’re obviously not the shooting star that the guy in the front is anyway.
    If you can’t make the effort to be in front, then who cares if you’re frowning. Losers!

  9. heh
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 12:14 pm

    Haha, Superfly. In the first, he looks happy, and in the second, satisfied. Can someone reasonably explain to me what the emotion of the people in the background has to do with #2? If it’s the theory of mind we’re talking about, wherein a person thinks about what another person might be thinking or feeling, then you should also consider that #2 may not have seen the faces of the people behind him, or that he has no idea they’re even there. Given that, a whole range of emotions is possible and the conclusion you draw, if not simple and general, must be drawn from personal experience.

  10. Slea
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 12:37 pm

    @Ted

    Looks like you and I were thinking along the same lines. I looked at the folks in the background, too (TN born and raised, mind) and came to similar conclusions.

  11. stonerindiekid
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 12:52 pm

    I am white, of English, Scots and Irish descent.

    I have a particular form of dyslexia (it’s an umbrella term) that means my eyes never rest on a single point, this bit of research means that I have Asian eyes, not dyslexia!

    I particularly noticed the upset looking ‘black’ guy in the background.

    With my super-duper tinted dyslexia glasses I noticed the foreground.

    Interesting, but a fatally flawed bit of research. They probably need to try putting on tinted glasses like I did, before they make any grand conclusions

  12. ave
    Jul 14th, 2010 at 9:45 pm

    To be honest, I completely saw the boy in the center. I didn’t even realize how sad the others were (in the right photo).

    I’m Asian. Raised in NY and CA.

  13. Jessss
    Jul 15th, 2010 at 2:20 am

    This could have something to do with America generally being an individualist culture where the focus is on the individual, and Japan generally being a collectivist culture where the focus is more often on the group.

    Perhaps people from individualist cultures are predisposed to identify more with the person in the middle and so pay less attention to the group, and people from collectivist cultures are pre-disposed to identify with the group, causing them to spend more time focusing on the people in the background even when asked to focus only on the person in the middle.

    Apologies for the run-on sentences :P


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