There is some evidence to suggest that culture can affect our basic visual perception. This idea is rooted in the concept of “cultural frames,” which refers to the way that people from different cultures interpret and understand the world around them based on their cultural experiences and beliefs.
Previous research has suggested that cultural differences in people may result in differences in basic visual perception. According to new research, there is no evidence that these differences have any bearing on how participants performed a basic visual task. The findings support the idea that basic visual perception mechanisms are universal.
According to UCLA psychologists, recent research claims that people of East Asian and European descent perform differently on a well-known visual perception test due to fundamental cultural differences may be exaggerated.
In new UCLA research, white, Asian American, and recent Asian immigrant college students in the United States performed similarly on the rod-and-frame task, which measures the influence of surrounding contextual visual information on perception. The findings, which were published in the journal PLOS One, suggest that the fundamentals of visual perception, such as object orientation, are largely independent of cultural variation and apply to a wide range of human populations.
If culture influences even the most basic visual functions, then all studies must take the cultures of the participants into account, as well as the fact that findings may not apply to other cultures. Perhaps more importantly, animal vision research will be of limited utility.
Zili Liu
What is the rod-and-frame task and what is the debate?
Participants in the rod-and-frame task must view a single line within a square frame and orient that line straight up and down vertically. The difficulty arises when the surrounding frame is tilted in various ways, influencing viewers’ perception of the line’s vertical orientation.
Historically, much of this type of research was conducted in Western countries with college students as participants, raising concerns about the accuracy of the data for people from other cultures and parts of the world.
Researchers investigating that question previously found that East Asians and Europeans performed differently on the rod-and-frame task; East Asians, the researchers said, tended to focus on the square frame first or give equal attention to the frame and the line, whereas Europeans emphasized the line more.
These researchers hypothesized that cultural influences could be at the root of the differences, with participants from East Asian cultures, which emphasize the embeddedness of individuals within collective groups, perceiving more holistically, and taking context into account, according to social scientists. Similarly, participants from Western cultures may perceive more analytically and independently of context, which social scientists say tends to elevate individuals over groups. The claims bucked against a fundamental assumption in visual neuroscience research that basic visual functions are the same for humans everywhere, as well as for non-human primates.
“If culture influences even the most basic visual functions, then all studies must take the cultures of the participants into account, as well as the fact that findings may not apply to other cultures,” said Zili Liu, a UCLA psychology professor and the current study’s corresponding author. “Perhaps more importantly, animal vision research will be of limited utility.”
If the previous findings were correct, Liu reasoned, people who have been immersed in another culture for a long enough period of time would begin to perform similarly to people raised in that culture on the rod-and-frame task.
“I thought UCLA was a good place to test this because we have many Asian American students, as well as more recent Asian immigrants to the U.S., and they should serve as supportive evidence that the longer people have lived here, the less the data would look like Asian nations,” Liu said.
Reassessing the influence of culture on the rod-and-frame task
Chéla R Willey, a UCLA doctoral student at the time of the study who is now an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University, recruited 342 UCLA students to perform the rod-and-frame task using virtual reality goggles. All students who took part in the study completed a questionnaire about their ethnicity and country of citizenship. Participants in the first experiment used a computer mouse to rotate the center line vertically.
In a second experiment, 216 of 342 students were asked to determine whether the line was moving clockwise or counter-clockwise with respect to the vertical. The 84 East Asian participants who completed both experiments included 40 second-generation Americans or older and 44 first-generation or non-citizens. Among the white dual-experiment participants, nearly all – 51 out of 57 – were second-generation Americans or beyond, while six were first-generation or non-citizens.
The first experiment revealed that a participant’s cultural background had little, if any, influence on how they judged the vertical orientation of the line inside both tilted and non-tilted frames. The researchers discovered no significant differences in ethnicity or generation in the second experiment. They did, however, notice a well-known gender difference in which frame tilt affects women’s perception more than men’s perception.
“The gender finding replicates what has been found in many other studies, indicating that our data are of reasonable quality,” Liu said. “Our failure to replicate the cultural effect suggests that culture may not have a significant influence on orientation perception.”
