Cognition and Perception

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Cognition and Perception
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Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking

• There appear to be two basic systems for
  reasoning analytic and holistic reasoning.
• Analytic thinking involves
• separating objects from each other
• breaking down objects to their component parts
• using rules to explain and predict an objects
  behavior
• relies on abstract thought.

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• Holistic thinking involves
• an orientation to the entire scene
• attending to the relations among objects
• predicting an objects behavior on the basis of
  those relationships
• relies on associative thought.

• Recently, there has been much research to suggest
  that these two very fundamental ways of thinking
  vary across cultures.

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• The way people understand the physical world is
  based on how they understand the social world.
• In independent cultures, people learn to think of
  others as being fundamentally independent from
  each other, and composed of their component
  parts.
• Likewise, the physical world can be understood
  the same way.

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• Likewise, people who are socialized in an
  interdependent context come to learn to attend to
  relations among people.
• This is generalized to an attention of relations
  among objects in ones environment.
• Research by Richard Nisbett and his former
  students provides much evidence from a wide
  variety of different sources that demonstrates
  this fundamental cultural difference.

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Analytic Thinkers Can Better Separate Objects
Within a Scene

• When perceiving a scene, holistic thinkers are
  more likely to perceive it as an integrated
  whole. This makes it more difficult to separate
  objects from each other in a scene. This is
  called field dependence.
• Being able to separate objects from each other is
  termed field independence.
• Often field independence is tested with a Rod and
  Frame task, where a rod is inside of a frame and
  they are both rotated.

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How did you do?
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What do you see here?

• Participants are first asked to describe the
  original pictures while they are looking at them.

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• When Westerners are shown pictures of animals and
  are asked to describe the scene, they typically
  start off by describing the focal animal (e.g., a
  wolf) (see Masuda Nisbett, 2001).
• East Asians, in contrast, more often describe the
  scene by starting off with the context (e.g., a
  snowy forest scene).

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• Later, participants are shown other photos, some
  of which theyve seen before, and some which
  include the original animal with a different
  background. They are then asked whether they
  have seen the animal in the picture before.

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Recognition Accuracy for Previously Seen Animals

• Westerners performance is relatively unaffected
  by the background of the scene.
• East Asians performance is significantly worse
  if the background of the scene is switched on
  them.
• East Asians appear to see the scene as bound
  together in an irreducible whole. Westerners see
  it as a collection of parts.

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• These same kinds of photos (i.e., an animal in a
  natural scene) were shown to young and elderly
  Americans and Singaporeans while in an fMRI
  scanner (Goh et al., 2007).
• The results showed that the object processing
  regions of the brain were especially active for
  all groups except the elderly Singaporeans.

• This suggests that, with age, Singaporeans come
  to increasingly view scenes in a holistic manner.

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How does the boy in the centre feel?
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• East Asians judgments of the centre targets
  facial expression are more influenced by the
  facial expressions of the surrounding others than
  are Westerners (Masuda, Ellsworth, et al., 2008).
• Judging emotional expressions is more of a social
  event for East Asians.
• How is it that East Asians are influenced more by
  the background of scenes? Do they recall
  background information better, or are their eyes
  processing the scene differently.
• To address this the researchers had participants
  wear an eye monitor and tracked their gaze.

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Interpreting Emotional Experience
Westerners Attention
East Asians Attention
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Masuda, Ellsworth, et al., 2008

• In the first second, people from both cultures
  largely look at the target figure. After that,
  the East Asians look more to the background than
  do Westerners, who continue to be largely fixated
  on the focal target.
• Other studies find that this cultural pattern
  also happens for nonsocial scenes. East Asians
  appear to more habitually look for relations in
  their environments.

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Perceptual Styles and Art
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Comparisons of Paintings in Museums
Masuda, Gonzales, et al., 2008
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• Why are there these different artistic traditions?

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Drawing by a European American Female
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Drawing by an East Asian Female
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Comparison of Student Drawings
Masuda, Gonzales, et al., 2008
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Taking Photos American Style
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Taking Photos East Asian Style
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Comparison of Photos
Masuda, Gonzales, et al., 2008
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• To summarize, Westerners and East Asians
  represent scenes differently.
• Westerners prefer lower horizons, which bring an
  emphasis to the foreground objects, and they
  prefer larger central figures.
• East Asians prefer higher horizons, with busier
  scenes, highlighting the relations among objects,
  and they prefer smaller central figures.

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Understanding Other Peoples Behaviors

• Analytic thinkers understand objects by focusing
  on their component parts, whereas holistic
  thinkers understand objects by considering their
  relations with the context.
• The same distinction can be applied to how we
  understand people.
• Explaining peoples behaviors by attending to
  their personal characteristics is known as a
  dispositional attribution.
• In contrast, explaining peoples behaviors by
  attending to contextual variables is known as a
  situational attribution.

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• Research with Westerners consistently finds that
  they attend more to dispositional information
  than situational information when explaining
  others, even when the situational constraints on
  peoples behaviors are obvious.
• In one classic study, American students were
  asked to evaluate an essay writers true
  attitudes by reading an essay that they had
  written which espoused either positive or
  critical attitudes towards Fidel Castro (Jones
  Harris, 1967).

• Participants assumed that the writer of the
  pro-Castro essay had more positive feelings
  towards Castro than the writer of the anti-Castro
  essay.

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• In other conditions, participants were told of
  some significant situational constraints on the
  essay-writers behaviors.
• In one condition, participants were told that the
  authors had been assigned their positions (i.e.,
  either pro-Castro or anti-Castro).
• In another condition, participants watched as
  another subject was asked to read a pre-written
  essay (either pro-Castro or anti-Castro).
• Participants always assumed that the person
  reading or writing the anti-Castro essay had more
  negative feelings towards Castro than the person
  reading or writing the pro-Castro essay.
• This is termed the fundamental attribution
  error.

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• One study explored peoples attributions in India
  and the US (Miller, 1984).
• Participants, who ranged in age from 8 year-olds
  to adults, read a number of scenarios where a
  target person did something, and then offered
  explanations for the target persons behaviors.

• Their explanations were coded for being either
  dispositional or situational.

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• American and Indian 8 year-olds gave similar
  attributions.
• As Americans got older, they made more
  dispositional attributions, but not situational
  ones. American adults show the fundamental
  attribution error.
• Older Indians made more situational attributions
  but not dispositional ones. Indian adults show a
  reverse fundamental attribution error.

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• Analytic and holistic thinkers show different
  reasoning styles.
• Analytic reasoners are more likely to apply
  abstract rules in order to solve problems.
• Holistic reasoners attend more to relationships
  among objects or events, looking for similarities
  or temporal relations.

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Which Flowers Belong to Which Groups?
Group 1 Group 2
A B
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Differences in Similarity Judgments between
Americans and East Asians

• European-Americans make these decisions more
  based on applying rules.
• East Asians and Asian-Americans make these
  decisions more based on the overall similarity
  between the targets and the groups.
• The cultural differences only emerge when there
  is conflict between analytic and holistic
  solutions. Both groups can reason well in purely
  analytic or purely holistic tasks.

Percentage
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Where do Reasoning Differences Come From?

• Nisbett (2003) argued that these reasoning
  differences reflect habits of thought dating back
  to classical Greek and Confucian Chinese thought.
• Analytic thought is evident in Aristotles view
  that objects possess properties such as
  gravity, and the Platonic view that the world
  consists of discrete unchanging objects operating
  by universal laws.
• Holistic thought is evident in classical Chinese
  ideas of harmony, interconnectedness, and change,
  e.g., early Chinese discoveries of action at a
  distance and in Chinese medical traditions.
• However, more recent research finds evidence for
  holistic thinking pretty much everywhere outside
  of the Western world.

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Tolerance for Contradiction

• One kind of reasoning, related to holistic
  reasoning, may have come from China.
• Chinese show a relative acceptance for
  contradiction, which has been termed naive
  dialecticism (Peng Nisbett, 1999).
• Based on a view that everything is connected and
  is constantly in flux. Symbolized by the yin
  and the yang - the universe moves back and forth
  between opposite poles.

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• In contrast, Aristotle proposed a different
  system for dealing with contradiction.
• He offered 3 principles.
• Law of Identity A A
• Law of Excluded Middle A B, or A Not B,
  these are the only two possibilities.

• According to this perspective, there cannot be
  any contradiction.

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• Consider the following two arguments
• A A sociologist who surveyed college students
  from 100 universities claimed that there is a
  high correlation among college female students
  between smoking and being skinny.
• B A biologist who studied nicotine addiction
  asserted that heavy doses of nicotine often lead
  to becoming overweight.
• A number of contradictory pairs of arguments were
  created, and American and Chinese participants
  received either just one argument from the pair,
  or they received both arguments.
• They were asked to evaluate how plausible they
  found the argument(s).

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• Participants tended to view one argument to be
  more plausible than the other.
• Americans who received both arguments showed a
  counternormative reasoning style in that they
  were more convinced that the stronger argument
  was correct when they also heard of a
  contradictory argument than if they had only
  heard the strong argument by itself.

• In contrast, Chinese viewed a strong argument to
  be less plausible if they heard a contradictory
  argument.
• However, they showed a counternormative response
  in viewing a weak argument as being more
  plausible if it was paired with a contradictory
  argument.

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• These attitudes towards contradiction are also
  evident in attitudes towards the self.
• East Asians are more likely than Westerners to
  offer apparently contradictory self-descriptions,
  saying, for example, that they are both shy and
  outgoing (see Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2004).

• There are also cultural differences in peoples
  predictions about the future.
• Westerners are more likely to view the future as
  unfolding in a linear way from the past. East
  Asians, in contrast, view change to be more
  cyclical, where good times might be followed by
  bad.

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Talking and Thinking

• What is the relation between talking and our
  private thoughts? Are our thoughts a silent
  monologue, involving processes the same as
  speech?
• Talking is an analytic process. We can only
  specify one idea at a time that is arranged in a
  sequence. It is difficult to discuss holistic
  ideas in which there are multiple connections
  that are simultaneously relevant.
• Holistic thinking should be impaired more by
  saying ones thoughts out loud than would
  analytic thinking.

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• One example of this can be seen in facial
  recognition.
• Studies find that when people verbally describe a
  face that this later impairs their recognition of
  the face, apparently because ones verbal
  descriptions do not capture the whole of the face
  (see Schooler Engstler-Schooler, 1990).

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• Westerners appear to value the spoken word more
  than East Asians.
• In Judeo-Christian beliefs the Word is sacred.
• The ancient Greeks viewed knowledge to emerge
  through the spoken word.
• The First Amendment to the US constitution is to
  protect ones freedom of speech.

• Lao Tzu said that He who knows does not speak.
  He who speaks does not know.
• Various Eastern religions also emphasize silent
  meditation rather than prayer.
• A Korean proverb states that An empty cart makes
  more noise.

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• The relation between thinking and talking has
  been explored by Heejung Kim (2002, 2008), who
  noticed, as a Korean grad student in the US, that
  there was an unfamiliar emphasis on discussing
  your ideas.

• She wanted to investigate whether the quality of
  peoples thinking is affected by saying ones
  thoughts out loud.
• She had participants attempt some items from the
  Ravens Matrices IQ test under different
  conditions.
• You can try to solve the next 2 items.

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• Kims studies were similar to this, except that
  Euro-American and Asian-American students (all of
  whom were born in the US) were assigned to one of
  two conditions
• In a Thinking Aloud Condition participants first
  completed 10 IQ items silently, and then they
  completed another 10 IQ items while saying their
  thoughts out loud.
• In an Articulatory Suppression Condition
  participants first completed 10 IQ items
  silently, and then they completed another 10 IQ
  items while saying the alphabet out loud.
• The dependent variable was how many IQ items they
  answered correctly when they were thinking aloud
  or saying the alphabet compared to when they were
  answering the items silently.

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Performance on Ravens Matrices

• When Euro-Americans are thinking aloud their
  performance is relatively unaffected.
• In contrast, Asian-Americans perform
  significantly worse when they are thinking aloud
  compared with when they are silent.
• On the other hand, Euro-Americans perform worse
  when they are saying the alphabet.
• Asian-Americans are relatively unaffected by
  saying the alphabet.
• This suggests that Asian-Americans silent
  thoughts are non-verbal on this task, whereas
  Euro-Americans are thinking verbally about the
  task even when silent.

Number Correct Compared with When Answering
Silently
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Implicit vs. Explicit Communication

• All spoken communication contains both implicit
  (i.e., nonverbal) and explicit information.
• In high context cultures, where people are
  highly connected with each other and there is
  much shared information to guide behavior, less
  explicit information is needed to be
  communicated.
• In low context cultures, there is less shared
  information to guide behavior and more explicit
  information is necessary in order to be clearly
  understood.
• People in high context cultures should have a
  harder time ignoring implicit information than
  people in low context cultures.

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• One study investigated this among Japanese (high
  context) and American (low context) participants
  (see Ishii, Reyes, Kitayama, 2003).
• Participants listened to words and were asked to
  indicate whether
• a the meaning of the word was positive or
  negative, or
• b the tone that the word was spoken was positive
  or negative.

• How quickly could people make these decisions
  when the tone and the meaning of the word were in
  conflict?
• People should have a more difficult time ignoring
  the aspect of the word (i.e., the tone or the
  meaning) that they are more used to attending to.

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Interference in Response Time

• Americans showed more interference when the task
  required that they ignore the meaning of the word
  to make the vocal tone judgment, than when
  ignoring the vocal tone to make a meaning
  judgment.
• Japanese showed the opposite pattern - it was
  easier for them to ignore the meaning of a word
  than its tone.
• This suggests that Japanese attend to nonverbal
  information in spoken conversation more than
  Americans.

Amount of Interference
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Does Language Influence Thought?

• A strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis is
  that language determines thought. Without access
  to the appropriate words people are unable to
  have certain kinds of thoughts.
• The strong version of this hypothesis has been
  largely rejected.
• A weaker version of the hypothesis is that
  language influences thought. Having access to
  certain words influences the kinds of thoughts
  that one has.
• There remains a lively controversy regarding the
  weaker version of the hypothesis.
• This is highly relevant to cross-cultural
  research as one way that cultures differ is in
  their languages and the words that are available
  to them.

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Language and Color Perception

• Although color exists along a continuum, color
  terms are discrete.
• Color terms vary dramatically around the world,
  although there are only a limited number of
  patterns of color terms in all languages.

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• This leads to the Whorfian question, if people
  dont have a word for green do they still see
  green the same way?
• Earlier research was conducted with the Dugum
  Dani who only have 2 color terms (e.g., Rosch
  Heider, 1972). The studies showed that the Dani
  could better learn new color terms that were
  closer to the prototypes of English color labels,
  than they could learn new color terms that were
  further from the English prototypes. This
  research was enormously influential in arguing
  that language is independent of thought.

• However, numerous researchers called attention to
  various technical problems with these studies.
  Recently, new research has been exploring whether
  color terms affect perception of colors.

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• Language Berinmo
• Location Papua New Guinea
• Subjects Monolingual hunters-gatherers
• Color Terms 5
• Language Himba
• Location Namibia, SW Africa
• Subjects Monolingual semi-nomadic herders
• Color Terms 5

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Array of Color Samples
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Blue-Green Stimuli

• Participants were shown triads of color chips and
  were asked to identify which two chips were more
  similar (Roberson et al., 2000, 2005).
• The chips were equidistant in terms of hue,
  however, two of the chips crossed a boundary
  between two different color terms.
• Peoples judgments for colors were compared when
  the two chips crossed a color boundary in their
  own language, or in another cultures language.

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Nol-Wor Stimuli
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Dumbu-Burou Stimuli
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• People make more judgments based on whether the
  color of the chips crossed the boundaries of the
  color terms in their own language than in the
  other languages.

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• Another way that languages vary is that some have
  egocentric spatial terms, such as right, left, in
  front of.
• Many languages lack terms for these. People
  describe location in terms of cardinal directions
  (e.g., north, east,...).
• What will people do when asked to recreate a
  scene when they change the direction that they
  are facing?
• In one study, Dutch speaking and Guugu Ymithirr
  speaking participants were shown some objects.
  They then went to a different room and were asked
  to recreate the scene.
• In one condition they faced the same cardinal
  direction in the second room. In the other
  condition they faced a different direction in the
  second room. The DV was how they arranged the
  objects in the second room.

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• Likewise, another study investigated whether
  people would represent the passage of time
  differently.
• Most English speakers arrange time as moving from
  the left to the right, likely because this is the
  direction that we read. Arabic-speakers, in
  contrast, arrange time from right to left, as
  they read that way too.

• In contrast, Australian aborigines who speak Kuuk
  Thaayorre arrange time as moving from the East to
  the West, following the sun.
• So what happens when Kuuk Thaayorre speakers are
  asked to arrange pictures in a temporal order?

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• Representing space in absolute terms is common
  among most subsistence societies in the world.
• This is common even among people who are
  bilingual and have learned egocentric direction
  terms in one of their languages - apparently,
  they prefer to represent space in absolute ways.
• Chimpanzees also dont represent space in
  egocentric ways.
• Egocentric space representation appears to be a
  relatively recent development in human history.

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Numerical Cognition in the Absence of Words

• Much of numeric cognition is a cultural invention
  - for the most part, people have few innate math
  abilities. Most abilities emerge with cultural
  learning.
• Young children are able to represent numbers up
  to 3, and after that, they require cultural
  learning to represent larger numbers.
• Some cultures do not have number terms beyond
  two. For example, the Piraha from the Amazon
  have number terms that correspond to 1, 2, and
  many.
• What happens when the Piraha are asked to do
  simple tasks that require counting to numbers
  beyond 3? (see Gordon, 2004).

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• The Piraha were asked to do a series of matching
  tasks, such as to guess whether there were any
  nuts remaining in a can after watching some be
  taken out, trying to copy some matching lines, or
  trying to match a series of knocks.
• In general, they had an approximate understanding
  of magnitude, such that they matched larger
  quantities with increasingly large quantities,
  however, they were only accurate up to small
  numbers, such as to 3 or 4.

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• The larger the number they were asked to
  represent, the larger was their error, however,
  they did show a general sense of approximate
  quantities.

• They often would use their fingers to aid their
  performance, however, this was highly inaccurate,
  even for numbers smaller than five.

• There is still much debate whether these
  indigenous tribes cannot represent numbers
  because they dont have the number terms (a
  Whorfian argument) or because they lack the
  cultural learning.

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• Subsequent studies reveal that very young
  children, as well as those from other tribes
  without number words (e.g., the Mundurucu from
  the Amazon) represent numbers logarithmically
  (Dehaene, Izard, Spelke, Pica, 2008).
• Mundurucu participants were shown on a laptop a
  line between the values of one and 10 dots. They
  were then shown a set of dots and were asked to
  indicate the position on a line.

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• Participants placed the line at positions that
  roughly corresponded to the logarithmic value of
  the number. For example, they rate the middle of
  the scale to be about a 3 rather than a 5.
• This, together with the results from young
  children, suggests that peoples innate number
  sense may be logarithmic, and they learn linear
  numbers greater than 3 through cultural learning.
• Much of what we understand about numbers only
  occurs as the result of cultural learning.