Proceedings of the National Conference On Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2012 Weber State University, Ogden March 29 31, 2012 Culture Differences in an Inattentional Blindness Study Tita E. Rodriguez-Godinez, Kathleen Someah & Sandivel Torres Garcia Psychology Department Dominican University of California 50 Acacia Avenue, San Rafael, California 94901 Faculty Advisor: William Phillips Abstract The purpose of this study was to determine if perception of a scene is different between people of Eastern cultures and people of Western cultures. Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan and Nisbett (2008) did two studies that showed differences between East Asians and Westerners with respect to pictures and photographs. Their results suggested that East Asians included more context information of a scene when drawing a picture or taking a photograph than Westerners. They had participants draw pictures of a house and sun, or take photographs of people. In both procedures, East Asians included more of the background than Americans. Simons and Chabris (1999) did a study on inattentional blindness. This occurs when attention is focused on one aspect of the environment, and other important aspects are missed. They had 228 observers (all undergraduate students) view a video of two groups of players bouncing a basketball to each other. One team was dressed in white, and the other team was dressed in black. The observers were told to count the number of bounces made by the white team, and to ignore the number of bounces made by the black team. During the video, a confederate in a gorilla costume walked across the screen. Simons and Chabris found that nearly fifty percent of the observers failed to see the gorilla. In the present study, Simons and Chabris s experiment was replicated. Undergraduate freshmen aged 17 to 18 were participants. The participants viewed the video of the two teams passing the basketball in groups of 20 to 40 people, and were told to count the number of passes made by the white team. They were then asked a set of questions concerning objects they saw in the video (including the gorilla). Based on the research done by Masuda et al., it was predicted that East Asians would be more likely than Americans to see the gorilla, and that East Asians would be able to remember more background information in the video. Keywords: Culture, Innatentional Blindness, Holistic, Analytic 1. Introduction The intent of this study was to determine if perception of a scene is different between people of Eastern cultures and people of Western cultures, specifically with respect to 'inattentional blindness' 4. Inattentional blindness occurs when you are focusing your attention on something else, and miss things in the environment. Simons and Chabris had 228 observers (all undergraduate students) view a video of two groups of players bouncing a basketball to each other. One team was dressed in white, and the other team was dressed in black. The observers were told to count the number of bounces made by the white team, and to ignore the number of bounces made by the black team. During the video, a confederate in a gorilla costume walked across the screen. Simons and Chabris found that nearly 50% of the observers failed to see the gorilla. In a study of cultural differences, Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan and Nisbett did two studies that showed differences between East Asians and Westerners with respect to pictures and photographs. Participants consisted of 43 Americans (39 European-Americans and 6 African Americans - 19 females and 24 males) and 46 international students (7 from Korea, 5 from Japan, 22 from Taiwan and 12 from China, 22 females and 24 males) drew pictures of a house and sun, or took photographs of people. Participants were first told to draw a landscape picture that
included a house, a tree, a river, a person and the horizon. Analysis of the pictures showed that East-Asian participants drew the size of the house and person in proportion to actual size, and drew more background things in their pictures. Americans tended to accentuate the person and house, and drew the river and horizon in less detail. The size of the person drawn was much larger in the American pictures than the East-Asian pictures 1. In the second study, Masuda et al. had the same participants take a photograph of a model. Standing at a set distance of 9ft. from the model, and using the same camera, participants were instructed to take a portrait of the model. The proportion of the frame of the entire photo taken up by the picture of the model was recorded. Results revealed that East Asians included more context information of a scene when drawing a picture or taking a photograph than Westerners. In both procedures, East Asians included more of the background than Americans, showing a preference for pictures that contain more background (contextual information) than Americans 1. In the present study, the experiment by Simons and Chabris was replicated. Based on the research done by Masuda et al., it was predicted that East Asians would be more likely than Americans to see the gorilla, and that East Asians will be able to remember more background information from the video. 2. Method 2.1 Participants Two-hundred thirty-seven freshman students (aged 18 to 19) from Introduction to Psychology courses at UC Berkeley, Dominican University of California and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln participated in this study as part of a course demonstration. The race as identified by participants on the questionnaire is depicted in Figure 1. From this information, individuals were classified as East-Asian or Asian-American based on their origin of birth. Those identified as East-Asian were born in Asia while those identified as Asian-American were born in the United States, but reported their race as 'Asian'. Participants who were classified as American were also born in the United States, yet may have distinguished their race as Hispanic, European-American, Native-American, or pertaining to a different nationality (see Figure 2). Data for 18 students were omitted from all analyses because the students had previously viewed the video, therefore affecting the internal validity of the study. 3 72 42 3 6 111 Black Asian Hispanic Native American White other Figure 1. Race information for all participants as identified on the questionnaire 1542
59 113 East-Asians Asian-Americans Americans 47 Figure 2. Cultural groups classified by the researchers based on origin of birth 2.2 Materials 2.2.1 gorilla video Materials consisted of a 30-second video from a DVD purchased from Viscog Productions, Inc. 5, as well as a DELL Inspiron laptop computer used to present the video to participants. This video was originally created by Daniel Simons as part of his initial study concerning inattentional blindness 4. 2.2.2 questionnaire Participants received a questionnaire containing demographic items (race and birthplace) and the following five questions: How many passes were made by the team in White? What letter appeared on the wall behind the players? How many elevators were there in the background? Describe anything unexpected or unusual that happened in the video. In order to study only those who had never viewed the video, participants were asked whether they had previously seen or heard of this video before this study. Those who responded yes were omitted from the final statistical analyses. 2.3 procedure Participants were presented the video as a class demonstration during their Introductory Psychology course. The video was shown to the entire class, which numbered from 20-150 students. Student participants were then presented with a 30-second video of two teams passing a basketball, and were asked to pay particular attention to the team dressed in white, while ignoring the team dressed in black. Specifically, students were instructed to count the number of ball passes between members of the white team. Following the video, the 5 questions were presented on the screen, and students were asked to individually complete the handout that provided space to answer each question. Subsequent to completing the questionnaire, the student sample was debriefed about the nature and intent of the study. 1543
3. Results The percentage of each cultural group who identified the gorilla, the letter S, the correct number of passes and the correct number of elevators appears in Table 1. As reported in the table, there were no significant differences among the three cultural groups with respect to identifying the gorilla, suggesting no relationship between culture and identification of the gorilla. There were, however, significant findings with respect to participants identification of the correct number of elevators present in the video clip, χ² (2) = 7.498, p <.05, therefore indicating a relationship between culture and identifying contextual information. There were also a significantly higher proportion of East- Asians who correctly identified the number of elevators than either Asian-Americans or Americans who noted the number of elevators. Additionally, the proportion of East-Asians and Americans who accurately reported the correct letter S significantly exceeded that of Asian-Americans, χ² (2) = 6.22, p <.05. Table 1. percentage of cultural group that correctly identified each dependent variable East-Asian Asian-American American Chi-Square p-value Gorilla 52.5 56.5 59.3 0.704.703 Letter-S 28.9 10.6 28.3 6.217.045 Elevators 25.0 7.1 11.3 7.498.024 Passes 57.6 68.1 68.1 1.152.482 4. Discussion Overall, the hypothesis that East-Asians would be more likely than Americans to correctly identify events in a visual display was partially supported. Though it was originally hypothesized that East-Asians would be more likely to note the presence of the confederate disguised as a gorilla, results indicated an absence of any significant relationship between these two variables. However, the hypothesis was supported with regard to letter identification and the number of elevators present in the video clip. Similar to the findings of Simons and Chabris 4, approximately half of the participants noticed the gorilla in the video clip (this was true for each cultural group). The present study revealed that participants demonstrated 'inattentional blindness' - individuals were not likely to notice an ongoing event when engaged in a focused attention task. Additionally, the difficulty of the forefront task can affect the level of inattentional blindness. Simons and Chabris reported that fewer participants noticed the gorilla when they had to count the total number of passes made by both teams. The results of our study partially mirrored findings from Masuda et. al. 1, in the sense that our analyses revealed a cultural difference in terms of whether participants perceived an image through a holistic lens or an analytical framework. Masuda noted that East-Asian participants demonstrated an inclination toward viewing an image in a holistic manner, meaning that they saw a relationship between the object and the context in which the object was located. When asked to take a photograph of an individual subject, participants affiliated with an East-Asian culture revealed an affinity towards placing the subject in the background of the image while landscape occupied the foreground aspects of the photograph. Contrastingly, Americans tended to zoom in on a particular subject, omitting contextual information in favor of the isolated figure. The results of such findings indicate a relationship between culture and perception of an image, and were partially supported within the present study. Norenzayan 3 also devoted considerable attention to cultural differences pertaining to holistic versus analytic perceptual tendencies. He presented individuals with a picture of two groups of flowers, designated Group 1 and Group 2, and asked participants to group a target flower with one of the two categories. Group 1 pertained to a more analytic approach (all members shared a one common feature) while Group 2 pertained to a holistic approach (overall family resemblance). Results of his study revealed that East-Asians were more likely to group the target flower with respect to family resemblance whereas Americans were more likely to group the target flower based on one shared feature. Similarly, Masuda and Nisbett 2 presented participants with a video of an aquarium and asked participants to describe what they saw in the image. They found that East-Asians emphasized contextual information as well as stationary background images while Americans described salient objects and distinguished larger, brighter and more rapidly moving objects. Again, this is described as the difference between holistic and analytic perception, which was partially supported by the present study. 1544
4.1 Limitations Partial support of our initial hypothesis may be explained according to several limitations of the study. Most noticeably is the notion that there may not actually be any cultural differences with respect to inattention and perception. Another possibility is that our sample consisted of students in the United States. It is plausible that the East-Asian and Asian-American participants had become acculturated, which therefore limited the findings produced from our data analysis. It is possible that the East-Asians had been in the United States so long that their perceptual tendencies become gradually assimilated to that of Americans' perceptual tendencies. A final consideration is the fact that this study only focused on the discrepancies relating to Eastern and Western cultures, therefore excluding other possible cultures, which may have demonstrated a relationship between culture and perception. 4.2 Future Research Further research endeavors should consider such discussed limitations as well as explore new procedural possibilities. One may want to consider testing participants individually rather than in a group or classroom setting. It is also advisable that one extend the sample to include children as a means of illustrating the length of time needed to adopt such specific cultural habits. It would also be interesting to note whether native East-Asians, who spent the majority of their life in Asia, demonstrated any differences from those born in Asia and then raised in the United States. This would involve traveling to countries within Asia in an attempt to obtain a genuine sample of individuals affiliated with an Eastern culture. 5. Acknowledgements The authors would like to give special thanks to Professor Bill Phillips, who made this entire research project possible. He showed incredible patience and gave us excellent feedback pertaining to how to collect data, interpret SPSS output, creating figures using Microsoft Excel, creating a poster, giving an oral presentation and putting all of it together into the present paper. The authors would also like to thank Professor Afshin Gharib, who aided in the data collection process. 6. References 1. Masuda, T., Gonzalez, R., Kwan, L., & Nisbet, R.E. (2008). Culture and aesthetic preference: Comparing the attention to context of East Asians and Americans. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(9), 1260-1275. 2. Masuda, T., and Nisbett, R.E. (2001) Attending holistically vs. analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 81, 922-934. 3. Norenzayan, A. et al. (2002) Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning. Cogn. Sci. 26, 653-684. 4. Simons, D.J. & Chabris, C.F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28, 1059-1074. 5. Viscog Productions, Inc. (2008). Surprising studies of visual awareness, volumes 1&2 (DVD). Champaign, IL: Viscog Productions, http://www.viscog.com 1545