Focus on the Foreground?
(c) 2005 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USAIn my user interface class this morning, our professor mentioned research showing that Asians tend to focus more on background elements in images than on foreground objects. The research was done in 2005 by psychologists at the University of Michigan. Here’s the article in PNAS, for those with journal access. Essentially, they tracked eye movement of American graduate students and Chinese grad students (all at U. of M.) while showing them images of animals with and without backgrounds. They also showed pictures of animals participants had already seen and asked them to register recognition. They found that Americans tend to focus on the foreground object sooner (we’re talking milliseconds here) and fixate on it longer, while the Chinese students glanced toward the background much more often. The graph above compares the number of times participants from the two groups participants looked at the foreground object at time intervals over 3 seconds from initial exposure. More recent fMRI work has shown that the two groups also activate different regions of the brain when performing similar tasks.
Not sure if these results have that much “implication for design,” but they are pretty interesting. I suppose there are problems with comparing American students with Chinese students who may be more alarmed by having American researchers put weird gadgets on their heads, and I don’t exactly buy their suggestion that these results imply Asians care more about context and Westerners focus more on objects and analysis, but the results are suggestive of the ways culture impacts physiology. Of course, a good follow-up study would be to compare adopted Asian Americans and white Americans from identical cultures and see how they compare.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I read the study you mention hoping that it would help me understand how Chinese web users deal with sites that have 3 times more content than a content-rich page in English, but alas it didn’t (by the way: 3 times is a made-up number, but the content on Chinese pages is on average much denser than anything else I’ve ever seen). The study had interesting points, but what mildly irritated me was the interchangeable use of Westerners/Americans and East Asians/Chinese/Japanese. The latter could be almost justified, since they had at least 2 different people who live in East Asia, but the former is absolutely objectionable, since in the study they dealt only with American students. And what really killed me was the conclusion: “East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning. In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context.” I’ll try to keep that in mind next time I go to my Western family gathering with 60 Western relatives and a minefield of role negotiations and rules…
March 31st, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Yeah, the sampling was far from perfect, and the generalizations you quote (based on two citations, one a review paper and the other a general reading book by one of the authors) are somewhat distasteful. In their defense, though, you don’t live anywhere near that extended family you mention. I’m guessing you live a fairly independent life in a city far away from those 60 relatives, where navigating the aforementioned minefield is not a daily ordeal.
That said, as the child of emigrants from Japan and Ireland, my Japanese family seems very nuclear, without a great deal of intra-generational communication, while my Irish family is both large (seemingly) socially cohesive. So, yeah. Take that, social sciences!