Art and Culture Differences

Trawinski and colleagues had British and Chinese people look at Western representational paintings and report that “Eye movements were recorded while participants viewed the paintings with each painting split into face, theme of the painting and its context regions of interest (ROIs). . . . With respect to the time-course of fixations across ROIs, Chinese participants focused more on the theme, and less on faces (and vice-versa for British participants), in a period starting around 2 s after the onset of viewing. Earlier in viewing there was evidence that Chinese participants had an increased focus on the context. The results (a) extend the findings reported by Trawiński, Zang, et al. (2021) on the impact of the Other Race Effect on the viewing of paintings; (b) show the time course associated with a more general cross-cultural influence on scene perception (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001).”  These findings are consistent with previous studies which found that people raised in Asia process scenes more holistically while people raised in the West (North America, Europe) are more likely to pay most attention to focal elements present.

Tobiasz Trawinski, Chuanli Zang, Simon Liversedge, Yao Ge, and Nick Donnelly. 2023. “The Time-Course of Fixations in Representational Paintings:  A Cross-Cultural Study.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 412-427, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000508