Cultural Differences in Visual Attention Emerge in Infancy

East Asians are more likely than North Americans to attend to visual scenes holistically, focusing on the relations between objects and their background rather than isolating components. This cultural difference in context sensitivity—greater attentional allocation to the background of an image or scene—has been attributed to socialization, yet it is unknown how early in development it appears, and whether it is moderated by social information. We employed eye-tracking to investigate context-sensitivity in 15-month-olds in Japan (n = 45) and the United States (n = 52). Viewing faces, Japanese infants were more attentive and studied the background longer than U.S. infants. Viewing cartoon videos, Japanese infants looked at the background twice as long as U.S. infants, particularly for objects with eyes. In parent-child book reading, Japanese parents referred to the background significantly more than U.S. parents, although this was uncorrelated with infant behavior on the preceding tasks. These findings illustrated that cultural differences in attention are detectable in infancy, and that sustained attention may be an important foundation upon which culturally-specific attentional styles are built. Overall, results were consistent with the view that a context-sensitive orientation first emerges for social information and later generalizes to non-social situations.