Cross-cultural differences in attention: An investigation through computational modelling

Abstract

Background

Behavioural research has shown that cultural membership can shape visual perception and attentional processes. In picture perception, members of collectivist cultures are more likely to attend the whole of the perceptual field than an individual salient item. Members of individualist cultures tend to attend the most salient object in the visual field. Understanding the brain processes that underlie these differences in visual attention is very important, as attentional processes can have significant impact on learning, navigation, communication and more. This study examines the perception of saliency among collectivist and individualist cultural groups using a computational modelling approach that is based on spiking neurons, the binding spiking Search over Time and Space (b-sSoTS) model. We simulated visual search for a salient target among distracters. We successfully simulated cross-cultural differences in early visual processes by altering the coupling parameter and varying the strength of connections between representations in the model. These findings indicate that the one of the potential causes of cross-cultural differences in visual perception can be the differences in encoding the mechanisms between individualist and collectivist cultural groups This study marks the first step investigating these processes by extending the behavioural research finding with computational modelling.