Cultural differences in attentional breadth and resolution

We have previously demonstrated that East Asians allocate attention more broadly when processing visual information than Westerners (Boduroglu et al. in J Cross-Cult Psychol 40(3):349–360, 2009 ). Since it is known that the processing efficiency in a region is inversely related to the size of the region attended, in this experiment we tested whether Chinese have reduced processing efficiency than Westerners using a functional field of view task. We asked viewers to detect and report the location of a briefly presented (67 ms) target at one of the 24 locations across three eccentricities. As expected, the Chinese performed significantly worse than Americans. Furthermore, Americans were more likely to identify of one of the neighboring positions instead of the actual target, the Chinese errors were more randomly distributed, suggesting that the Chinese may have had a harder time precisely representing targets in this fast pace task. These differences were not due to general ability differences across the samples for the same set of participants performed equally well visual working memory and interference resolution tasks.