Science!

Ok, so maybe I've been (successfully) avoiding science classes since I was 15, but I still thought this was pretty cool (thanks Emma for sharing it!). Full story at Wired Science and the actual scienciness at PLoS ONE. It also appears that Japanese are more sensitive than Westerners to the Big Picture.

Culture shapes perception so fundamentally that it may determine the way we look at faces.

East Asians focus their gazes on the center of faces; Westerners looked to first the eyes, and then to the mouth.

The findings were produced by University of Glasgow psychologists who tracked the eye motions of observers as they looked at portraits.

The study was small and hasn't been replicated, but the differences were stark.

Other researchers have found similar differences in the perception of scenes, but never something so basic as individual faces. The phenomena could reflect a cultural mediation of individual neurobiology.

"Western society is very individualist. Asian societies are much more collectivistic," said study co-author Roberto Caldara.

From that perspective, the Western approach to facial recognition is piece-by-piece and intimate. The East Asian approach is both more formal and holistic: peripheral information is gathered, but without direct confrontation.

But is this tendency a product of a particular approach to life -- or vice versa?

"It's the chicken and the egg problem," said Caldara. "We're testing children to see whether these effects arise early in time."

The tendencies do appear plastic, he said.

"We tested some Chinese who had been in Glasgow for three or four years, and you see a clear difference between them and those who just arrived," he said. "That really demonstrates that it's not genetic. It's experience."

Caldara suspects that the East Asian approach may be more efficient, but both groups in the study proved equally adept at learning and recognizing faces.

"It's fascinating, and this is just the beginning," he said.

Caldara's next studies will involve British-born Chinese and children, but he said that the current research is already instructive.

"Culture is underestimated. The majority of papers published in psychology are based on Caucasian populations. In the future, before generalizing findings, we should be careful. Human beings are not all the same," he said.