von Gugelberg, Helene M.; Mayer, Boris (12 July 2022). Cross-Cultural Differences in Visual Perception and Aesthetic Preferences (Unpublished). In: 26th International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. Online. July 12 – 16, 2022.
The comparison of countries that are either ascribed a holistic or an analytic style of perception is common practice. Holistic perception highlights context information and the relation between objects is paramount. With an analytic perception style, the focal object is of greatest importance and context is de-emphasized. Here, we compare samples from the US, Germany and India with regard to their perception style. A total of 596 participants completed the Framed Line Test (FLT) and performed a photo selection task (PS). The absolute task of the FLT requires the context-free reproduction of a line within a frame while the relative task asks for the context-bound reproduction of the line. The PS has participants choose their favorite photograph out of a set of four, where only the size of the depicted person was manipulated while the background stayed the same. We hypothesized that participants from India would show a higher accuracy in the relative FLT task compared to the two Western samples, while participants from the US and Germany would show a higher accuracy in the absolute task. Furthermore, Indian participants would select pictures with more background information (smaller model sizes) compared to participants from the US and Germany. For the FLT, an interaction effect of cultural group and task resulted. While participants from the US and Germany had a more accurate performance in both tasks compared to Indian participants, the difference was significantly smaller for the relative task, indicating a relatively better performance of Indian participants in this task, which was in line with hypotheses. In the PS, contrary to predictions, participants from India chose larger model sizes compared to participants from the US or Germany. Results indicate that the two opposing cultural perception styles cannot be easily distinguished and further research including a broader variety of countries is needed.
