Chapter 9 Textbook: Cognition and Perception

Linguistic Relativity and Odor Perception

"Humans are astonishingly bad at odor identification and naming" - take w/ a grain of salt b/c participants of this kind of research usually w/ European-language speakers (problem: b/c European language suffer from a paucity of odor terms.) - Jahai, a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers living in the Malay peninsula, have a much larger lexicon of olfaction words. Study: - group of Americans were good at color naming, reaching agreement in the color words. BUT they were really bad at it for consensus of odor naming - Jahai did as well in naming odors as they did colors Possibility: if English speaker learned a larger set of olfaction words they might also become better at recognizing different odors.

Rule Based Reasoning

Analytic thinkers tend to view the world as operating according to set of universal abstract rules and laws, thus applying such rules and laws when they try to make sense of a situation.

Attention

Analytic thinkers, who tend to perceive the world as consisting of discrete objects, would be more likely to focus their attention on separate parts of a scene. In contrast, holistic thinkers, who tend to perceive the world as consisting of an interrelated whole, should direct their attention more broadly, across an entire scene. European Americans are more likely to describe what they see based on a single aspect of an image (e.g. Inkblot card); Chinese-Americans were more likely to give "whole-card" responses, describing what they see based on the entire image. The cultural difference in how people attend to parts of scenes is also evident at the neural level - Westernized subjects show more activation of object-processing regions in the brain compared to Asians. In contrast, no cultural variation was found in areas associated with processing contexts and background. - Additionally, as people age, their neural functions continue to be shaped by normative cultural attention patterns, showing that people rely on different brain regions for processing visual information in scenes.

Naive Dailecticism

Aristotle proposed the law of non-contraindication, in which he submitted that no statement could be both true and false, and thus "A" could not equal "not A" - Relative to E. Asians, Westerners appear to view change as occurring in more linear ways; change appears to occur in rather static and predictable ways. In contrast, E. Asians appear to believe that change itself happens in rather fluid and unpredictable ways. Study 1: If participants do not find choice B compelling, a normative strategy would be to ignore it, or perhaps to hedge their bets by being a little less confident in choice A. - Americans thus respond to a contraindication by denying that it exists; being so confident in that A is correct, they deny that there is a problematic contradiction. - When Chinese participants encounter choice B alone, they do not find it to be very plausible. But when they see B paired with A, which makes the opposite case, they were then *more* convinced by the implausible choice B. - Apparently, the Chinese are reaction to the argument in that they have noticed the contradiction and it reminds them that the world is often contradictory, making it difficult to say which side is right and which is wrong. The contradiction is accepted as it is, and they do not seem motivated to get rid of it.

Measuring Cultural Variation in Attention

Best way is by using an eye-tracker, examining precisely where someone is looking at any given instant. Study results show that Japanese judgments of a target person's emotional expression were influenced by the expressions of the people in the background. In contrast, the expressions of the background people had no impact on the judgments of the faces for the Americans. Again, providing evidence that E. Asians attend more to the background context than Westerners.

Analytic Thinking

Characterized by a focus on objects and their attributes. - Objects are perceived as existing independently from their contexts, they are understood in terms of their component parts. - In general, it is more common in Western cultures than it is elsewhere, particularly in East Asia. In Ancient Greek Development: Evident in the platonic perspective that the world is a collection of discrete, unchanging objects that can be categorized by reference to a set of universal properties. - Evident in the elaborate formal logic system that search for the truth according to abstract rules and syllogisms that existed independently of observations.

Holistic Thinking

Characterized by an orientation to the context as a whole. It represents an associative way of thinking, which gives attention to the relations among objects and the surrounding context. - - Objects are understood in terms of how they relate to the rest of the context, and their behaviour is predicted and explained on the basis of those relationships - More common in E. Asian and other cultures than in Western cultures. In Ancient Chinese Development: Evident in intellectual traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism emphasized harmony, interconnectedness, and change. - the Chinese tendency to view the world as consisting of continuously interacting substances led them to discover the concept of action at a distance 2,000 years before Galileo did.

Creative Thinking

Creativity is the generation of ideas that are both (a) novel and (b) useful and appropriate In general, the generation of novel ideas appears to be facilitated by individualism, and Westerners, accordingly, appear to generate more ideas and East Asians (Maybe because of a greater motivation for uniqueness or preference for novel objects). - the novelty part of the creativity equation appears to be facilitated by individualism and Western cultural experiences. Tendencies for Western artists to be more likely than the average person to suffer from mental illness BUT an analysis of Chinese creative geniuses does not find as strong a link between creativity and mental illness. It's possible that a continual push for novelty, rather than usefulness, is associated with more mental disturbances. Collectivism appears to be associated with the generation of useful rather than novel ideas. This orientation toward finding practical solutions that can fit within an existing set of social concerns appears to lead to skills for creating useful ideas more generally. In general, more-collectivistic E. Asian cultures, with their emphasis on useful ideas, are more likely to foster incremental innovations, whereas more-individualistic Western cultures, with their emphasis on novel ideas, encourage more breakthrough ones. - Incremental innovations highlight the important role of useful ideas, because they typically involve modifying an idea to better fit with the practical constraints around it. Conclusion: two key components to creative ideas, novelty and usefulness and individualistic and collectivistic cultures and encourage these two differently. - the most creative ideas in one study were found when team members were primed with both individualistic and collectivistic ideas, and the most creative ideas emerged when people were exposed to aspects of multiple cultures.

Attentional Variation in Art

East Asians naturally direct an audience's eyes to the relations among the different objects ad places within a scene, whereas Western paintings tend to direct an audience's attention to a particular focal objects. - Western portraits also tend to show larger figures, and larger faces, in particular, serve to focus one's attention on the portrayed individual. In contrast - East Asians drew a horizon significantly higher in picture than Americans and provide a more complex background (more contextual objects) in the drawing. Overall, E. Asians are more likely than Americans to situate their objects in context. - Japanese scenes typically contain more boundaries and much more content. Interestingly, the regular exposure to busier environments among East Asians facilitates their ability to process busy scenes. These experiences are associated with better skills for finding details in a busy scene.

Toleration of Contraindication

East Asians seem to share a corresponding view that reality is continually in flux. - The Yin and Yang represent opposites (literally meaning moon and sun), and they indicate that the universe is constantly in flux, moving from one opposite pole to the other and back again. - This view not only highlights that reality is in flux but also indicates that opposing truth can be simultaneously accepted. Study 1: Participants were asked to describe themselves in an open-ended questionnaire. - Chinese were more likely to provide statements that were in apparent contradiction with each other (e.g. answers suggesting they have both high and low self-esteem.) Same thing in a study with Korean participants.. - While having contradictory self-views in the US is associated with feelings of anxiety/depression, in Japan there was no relation b/w how contradictory one's self-views are and how anxious and depressed they are. Chinese are almost twice as likely as Americans to predict that a trend will reverse direction in the future, whereas Americans were more likely to assume that a trend would continue in the same direction as the past.

Linguistic Relativity and Spatial Perception

English speakers often identify locations based on their position relative to the speaker, using terms like left, right, front and back. But these direction are accurate only from the perspective of the speaker. Guugu Yimithirr (aboriginal Australian group) do not include any of the terms used in English. Instead, who identify space in absolute terms, like the cardinal points on a compass. Study: Dutch vs. Guugu Yimithirr were shown a row of figures of a cow, pig, and person on a table in one room. The table was against the north wall, so participants were facing north. Then P's were moved to another room that was facing south and asked to recreated the same scene. - Dutch tended to recreate the scenes based on their own position relative to the animals. - Most of the G.Y. speakers re-created the scenes in absolute terms. The Whorfian explanation is that because G.Y. spatial language is based solely on the cardinal direction, they conceive the arrangement of their world on with respect to these directions. Dutch speakers elaborate more on directions relative to their physical selves, so its less useful to attend to the cardinal directions in most situations. - The G.Y. tendency to conceive of directions in ways that are not relative to their bodily location appears to be more common among subsistence populations throughout the world and is also more similar to the ways that chimpanzees understand directions. ALSO The idea that left is perceived as theorigin of time in English is somewhat arbitrary and is likely determined by the fact that English is written from the left to the right. In contrast, Arabic is written from the right to the left, and Arabic speakers likewise see time passing right to left.

Dispositional Attributions

Explaining people in terms of their underlying dispositions - more common in WEsterners

Situational Attributions

Explaining people's behaviours in terms of contextual variables - more common among East ASians

Associative Reasoning

Holistic thinkers are more likely to make sense of a situation by considering the relationships among objects or events. - Tend to look for evidence of events clustering together, such as similarity among events or of temporal contiguity of events

Reasoning Styles

In pictures, rule-based reasoning leads to different solutions that would be reached with associative reasoning. - European-Americans are more likely to base their decisions on the application of rules whereas East Asians are more likely to base their decision on the perceived resemblances of the stimuli. - East Asians are more likely to use holistic reasoning in a situation when there is a *conflict* between an analytic and a holistic solution. In situations when there is no conflict, Westerners should be able to engage in holistic reasoning and E. Asians should be able to rely on analytic reasoning. - Holistic thinkers tend to see actions as having distal, and sometimes unexpected, consequences. Analytic thinkers should focus their attention on the relations between a relatively small number of discrete objects or events. - Analytic thinkers should be more concerned with *direct* relations between objects or events. For holistic thinkers, the world consists of many overlapping and related events.

Low-contrast culture

Less involvement among individuals, and there is less shared information to guide behaviour. - It is necessary for people to communicate in more explicit detail, as others are less able to fill in the gaps of what is not said. - Common in N. American and English speaking cultures

Talking and Thinking

Often, students of Asian background speak up less in class than those of other cultural backgrounds. - Talking and language have held a privileged position in much of Western intellectual history; speaking is valued in the West because it is viewed as an act of self-expression and as inextricably bound to thought. - In contrast, in many East Asian cultural traditions there has been considerably less emphasis on talking, if not outright suspicion of the spoken word. "An empty cart makes more noise." There are rather pronounced cultural differences in speech even among young children. - E. Asian mothers speak less to their children than Westerners, and E. Asian infants vocalize much less as well. - The closer the relationship, the more people are likely to rely on nonverbal communication rather than the spoken word. Study: Talking outloud while performing a task - European-Americans performed about the same on the test when they were speaking as when they were silent. This suggests that talking and thinking are very much related for European-Americans. - However, Asian-Americans performed significantly worse on the test when they were talking aloud. Expressing their thoughts outloud interfered with their thinking. This suggests that Asian-Americans perform better if they are able to think quietly to themselves.

Cultural Variation on Nonverbal Communications

Participants were presented with either pleasant or unpleasant words, accompanied by either a pleasant-sounding tone or an unpleasant sounding tone. - Americas showed more interference in their judgments about the vocal tone (while ignoring the meaning of the words) than they did when making judgments about the meaning of the words (while ignoring the vocal tone). Suggests that *They chronicaly attend to the meaning of what is said more than they do to the tone in which it is spoken*. - Japanese participants showed more interference when they needed to attend to the meaning of the word and ignore the tone than they did when attending to the tone while ignoring the meaning. This means that *the Japanese are habitually attending to the tone in which things are said more than they are to the precise content of what is being said*

High Context Culture

People are deeply involved with each other, and this involvement leads them to have much shared information that guides their behaviour. - There are clear and appropriate ways of behaving in each situation, and this information is widely shared and understood so it does not need to be explicitly communicated. - Information is conveyed nonverbally, with the content of the words sometimes being rather empty. - Common in E. Asian cultures Example: Japanese tend to actively avoid leaving messages on answering machines and are less than half as likely as Americans to do so. - Americans don't like answering machines b/c they're worried that it won't be seen, whereas Japanese don't like them because they say its hard to speak without feedback.

Categorical Perception

Perceiving stimuli as belonging to separate and discrete categories, even though the stimuli may gradually differ from each other along a continuum. - Studies show that most English speakers show some evidence for categorical perception. - English speakers were more likely to make judgments in line with categorical perception for that crossed the "blue-green" category. In the same study, Berinmo (Papua New Guinea) speakers were more likely to show evidence for categorical percpetion when they discriminated between two stimuli that crossed the "nol"(yellow) "wor"(green) boundary

Field Independence

Separating objects from their background fields. - common in analytic thinkers - People in industrialized societies also tend to be quite field independent, except for people living in highly industrialized E. Asia, where clear evidence for field dependence is found.

Taxonomic Categorization

Stimuli are grouped according to the perceived similarity of their attributes. Taxonomic categorization answers are especially common among Westerners in studies of attribution.

Thematic Categorization

Stimuli are grouped together on the basis of causal, temporal, or spatial relationships among them. Especially common among E. Asians. - Difference in categorization strategies reflects an underlying difference in the ways that people attend to their worlds.

Numerical Cognition

Studies regarding color and spatial perception are consistent with a weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis. That is, the results support the notion that the language differences between the cultural groups influenced the way the participants thought about the tasks. Language can influence thought. - The most compelling evidence that much of our competence with mathematics and numbers is learned through cultural experiences, rather than being innate, comes from looking at the numerical systems of various subsistence societies. E.g. Piraha have a weak number system so they're bad at counting number of objects past two BUT they do have rough quantity estimation skills. - An absence of numbers, people may use spatial strategies of trying to match the pattern of a set of objects to estimate quantities in the absence of numbers Conclusion: In the absence of linguistic terms for specific numbers, people from some cultural groups do not seem able to understand the associated numerical concepts. - Cultures that have few numbers terms also seem to map numbers onto space differently. The way that people in industrialized societies learn about numbers is linear. - However, without the cultural input, people do not have an innate linear sense of numbers. Instead kids have a logarithmic sense, they see larger amounts of space between small numbers than they do between large numbers.

Field Dependence

Tendency to view objects as bound to their backgrounds. - common in holistic thinkers. - Those who are more outgoing are more field dependent than people who are more introverted; Similarly, farmers who live in societies where they must coordinate their actions with others are more field dependent than people who hunt and gather or who herd animals.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Termed "fundamental" because it is viewed to be deeply ingrained in us. - When we see people acting, we assuming they are doing it because of their underlying dispositions, and we tend to ignore the situational constraints that might be driving their behaviour.

Saccades

The extremely quick eye movements that shift people's gaze from one fixation point to another. Compared to the Americans, the Chinese were more systematically scanning the entire scene. - Studies suggests that people from different cultures are not seeing the same things even when they are looking at identical scenes, even though our eye movements occur outside of voluntary control. - East Asians have been socialized from a young age to attend to relationships that they do so unconsciously by continually scanning scenes. Westerners, in contrast, have been socialized to attend focal objects, and they thus habitually tend to their attention at such objects.

Why does cultural variation exist in Talking and Thinking

The nature of holistic thinking makes it difficult to expression in words because speech is ultimately a sequential task. When you speak, one idea follows another. You can't easily describe multiple relations at once. In contrast, with analytic thinking, with the emphasis on focusing on separate parts, lends itself very well to the spoken word. Each part can be described separately and sequentially. As such, speech is likely to interfere with performance on holistic tasks. Study 1: people were better able to recognize the faces they had previously been shown if they had *not* tried to describe them before. Their verbal descriptions interfered with their ability to process the face as a whole, causing them to have poorer recall. Study 2: Participnts recited the Alphabet while trying to recite Raven's Test. Because these two tasks are so different, they should cause little interference with each other and performance should be largely unaffected. In contrast, if talking and thinking are fundamentally connected for European-Americans, being asked to recite the alphabet while thinking about something else should be challenge. - European-Americans did very poorly on the IQ task when they were reciting the alphabet, indicating that their thoughts while solving that task apparently were verbal and were interfered with by their verbal recitation of the alphabet. In contrast, reciting the alphabet had no significant effect on the performance of the Asian-Americans. It seems that for European-Americans, stating their choice is an act of self-expression and resulted in a greater feeling of commitment, while for Asian-Americans, expressing their choices makes little impact.

Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking

The origins of analytic and holistic thinking are argued to arise from the different social experiences people have within individualistic and collectivistic societies. - Nisbett et al. argue that cultural differences in ways of understanding *people* also shape the kinds of information people attend to in their physical environments. According to Nisbett et. al., cultural differences in ways of thinking between Westerners and E. Asians persist to this day because ancient Greece and Confucian China provided the intellectual groundwork from which modern Western and East Asian societies have evolved. Even within cultures there are parallel differences: working class Americans and Russians are more holistic than their middle-class compatriots

Linguistic Relativity and Color Perception

There is tremendous diversity in the ways people label colors, and this diversity emerges in systematic ways. All known languages have a minimum of two color terms. - language with 2 term of colors along the spectrum: the Dani, "black" (dark colored hues), "white" (which includes all lighter hues) - language w/ 3 color terms: words roughly correspond to black, white, and red. - languages w/ 4 color terms: have words the approximate the colors of black, white, red and either green or yellow. - Languages w/ 5 color terms: same as 4 color terms and green AND yellow. - Languages w/ 6 color terms: adds blue to the list. - Languages w/ 7 color terms: add brown to the list. The focal point of each of these color categories is largely similar across language groups. *Conclusion:* People who speak different languages carve up the color spectrum in some rather divergent ways; however, these differences do not emerge arbitrarily, and there are some strikingly consistent patterns across languages. BUT color perception and memory are largely independent from the color words that were in a language.

Variability in Fundamental Attribution Error

Westerners are more likely to conceive of people in terms of abstract personality traits than Easterners, who attend to others in terms of the concrete behaviours they engaged in. Behaviour is more likely to be interpreted by European-Americans as indicating an underlying trait. Across cultures, young kids give similar attributions to a person's behaviour but as Western kids get older, they become more likely to make dispositional attributes, whereas situational attributions remained largely unchanged. Meanwhile, as Eastern kids got older, they made more situational attributions whereas their dispositional attributions did not change significantly. By adulthood, Westerners show clear evidence of FAE, while Easterners show *reverse* FAE because they tended to focus more on the situation rather than the disposition. Personality information is not seen as equally important for explaining the behaviour of others in all cultural contexts, although the cultural differences are most pronounced when the situational information is made highly salient.

Linguistic Relativity and Perceptions of Agency

When describing an accident in English, people commonly use an agentive description. Less common are nonagentive sentences. - Interesting: when English speakers want to avoid blame, they are more likely to describe things in a nonagentive way. In Spanish, in contrast, nonagentive expressions such as "Se rompio el florero" ("the vase broke itself") are more common. English and Spanish speakers were equally accurate when identifying the targets who had acted intentionally (the languages did not differ in how they describe intention agency); however, the English speakers were more accurate that the Spanish speakers in recalling who had broken the vase unintentionally. - By not being obliged to encode for agency with unintentional behaviours, Spanish speakers attended less to who had actually broken the vase and were less likely to recall that fact.

Whorfian Hypothesis

aka Linguistic Relativity The strongest version of this hypothesis is that language determines how we think-that is, we are unable to do much thinking on a topic if we don't have the relevant words available to us. - well this hypothesis is also universally rejected. A weaker version of this hypothesis is that the language we speak affects how we think.