CHAMPAIGN Ill.
On Denise Park’s office wall is a lovely Asian painting, kind of a market scene in what looks to be a village square.
The piece is colorful and filled with interesting aspects. What it lacks is a central object or subject that grabs the attention right off, a feature common in Western art, from still life bowls of fruit to the farm couple in “American Gothic.”
Park, a University of Illinois psychology professor, points to the painting as an example in discussing something scientists have known for a decade about differences in the way Asians and Westerners process visual information.
In Asian societies, where fitting in is generally valued, the focus is likely to be on the relationships in a scene, its context. Meanwhile, Westerners, traditionally more individualistic, tend to focus on central or dominant objects.
Last year, Park, UI postdoctoral researcher Angela Gutchess and University of Michigan researchers published a study showing that Americans and Asians viewing the same picture had different patterns of brain activity. The Americans exhibited more activity in parts of the brain associated with object processing, the Asians more in parts associated with processing the background of scenes.
Now, Park and colleagues at the UI and in Singapore have shown that these cultural tendencies may actually affect the brain’s way of functioning over time, particularly the region in the back of the brain where we do visual processing.
