just in in-tray, and i quote
"In late 2004 Nisbett and two graduate students, Hannah Faye Chua and Julie Boland, set out to recruit a group of fifty graduate students from around the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. Half of the students had been raised and educated in the United States; the other half, though now students at UM, had been raised in China. On the day of the experiment, the students arrived at Nisbett’s lab and filled out a short questionnaire about their personal histories. Then Chua led them to an awkward-looking lab setup on a table which included a computer screen at one end and a chin rest at the other. On a desk nearby was a head-mounted device that would track the students’ eye movements. After strapping on the device, the research subjects placed their chin on the small plastic rest, and the lights in the lab were turned off. A picture of a small cross was beamed onto the screen in front of them. Then one by one, at thirty-second intervals, a series of pictures appeared on the screen. The pictures had all had a similar visual motif, an image of a large object in what Nisbett called a “realistic complex background”: a tiger in a forest, for instance, or a horse in a field of flowers. The research subjects were shown thirty six images for about three seconds each. After each image, the screen returned to the white background with the cross, and the students were asked to refocus on the cross. When a new image appeared a few seconds later, the eye tracker silently recorded where they looked and for how long. Then the screen went white again and the process was repeated.
When the students had finished, Chua sorted the eye-movement data and found a pattern so clear that her first instinct probably should have been to wonder if there was a mistake somewhere. While observing the images flashed in front of them, the American students immediately looked at the foreground objects – the horse or the tiger for example. And once they spotted that image, they spent the bulk of the time before the screen went white again looking right at it. The Chinese, by contrast, usually looked at the environment around the main object first, probing that “realistic complex background” of forest or field. They did look at the focal object, but for far less time than the Americans did. “There was no time point at which the Chinese were fixating on the objects significantly more than the backgrounds”, Nisbett wrote later. This was, to a Western point of view, a bit weird. It was as if someone took out his wallet to show pictures of his kids and you started complimenting the furniture in the snapshot.
It was too simple to see that the Americans stared at the main object to the exclusion of everything else, but when the researchers later tested the students to see what they recalled, this was more or less the pattern that emerged. The Americans had a better ability to recall specific objects they had seen: horse, car, dolphin. The Chinese often forgot what object had been in a given scene but recalled the backgrounds in detail. In fact, simply by changing the backgrounds, Nisbett and his colleagues could fool the Chinese into saying they had not seen a particular object before. You could flash a picture of a brown horse in a field, a stream, or a forest, but if you put the same brown horse in a street scene later on and asked the Chinese students if that ever seen it, they usually answered no. What was going on ? Nisbett hazarded this guess: “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.” That was partly true – you can see why, in a world where context matters so much, Westerners-style seeing might be a liability. But there was something much more profound occurring as well, something vitally important for our own thinking about the world.
This emphasis about everything around us instead of a “mefirst” view of life reveals a quirk in the Asian way of seeing, one that also showed up in Nisbett’s study if we look at it in the right way. Western science saw the world as something that could be understood and dominated. But ancient Chinese thinking was obsessed instead with the mysterious, impenetrable part of nature.
With this view of the world, one that takes constant change as a given, it’s easy to see why you might want to keep your eyes moving. More than anything, what you want to know is when change is going to begin. In Chinese philosophy this sense is known as a mastery of incipience, and the skill is often praised as the biggest form of wisdom. Those Chinese graduate students dancing their eyes around the background of Nisbett’s images were furiously trying to gather information about what surrounded the central object because they believed, at a level so deep it was programmed into their eye movements, that the environment contained clues to what was about to happen. If you stared at a single spot in the world around you, that incipient sensibility would be dulled to the point of uselessness.
Americans think the focal object is the most important part of any image in front of them. They stare. And in so doing they miss crucial details around the object. Would American students notice a change in the environment if the focal object remained the same? If , say, the horse stayed the same but the field around it went from spring flowers to fall colors? Most of the subjects missed the shift. When it came to the environment, Americans were almost completely “change blind”." |
