Comparing linguistic and cultural explanations for visual search strategies

Abstract Visual search studies have shown that East Asians rely more on information gathered through their extrafoveal (i.e., peripheral) vision than do Western Caucasians, who tend to rely more on information gathered using their foveal (i.e., central) vision. However, the reasons for this remain unclear. Cognitive linguists suggest that the difference is attributable linguistic variation, while cultural psychologists contend it is due to cultural factors. The current study used eye-tracking data collected during a visual search task to compare these explanations by leveraging a semantic difference against a cultural difference to determine which view best explained strategies used on the task. The task was administered to Chinese, American, and Japanese participants with a primary focus on the Chinese participants’ behaviors since the semantic difference aligned the Chinese participants with the Americans, while their cultural affiliation aligned them with the Japanese participants. The results indicated that the Chinese group aligned more closely with the American group on most measures, suggesting that semantic differences were more important than cultural affiliation on this particular task. However, there were some results that could not be accounted for by the semantic differences, suggesting that linguistic and cultural factors might affect visual search strategies concurrently.