sight unseen

It may be essential to our survival that we are hardwired to recognize and respect the human face. Even very soon after birth, a baby's inchoate brain can focus on and seemingly discriminate between faces. Interpersonal relationships, communication and trade, of course, have been indispensable to mankind for eons. It's no surprise, then, that nature would hard-code this instinct into our incipience.

Some more surprising perceptual adaptations occur after birth, and many are largely manifestations of cultural experience. Visual perception, in particular, can be tempered by context and by the perceiver's world-view. Recently, research has been conducted at MIT differentiating between particular perceptive tendencies of Asians versus Americans of European descent. The cultures in question are of course widely different - philosophically and aesthetically, and these differences apparently manifest themselves in subjects' visual perception.

The archetypal Asian world-view revolves around a concept of harmony. Major philosophical movements: Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, all identified with this precept. Asian architecture, largely, is composed horizontally and resonates with the landscape. The ornate roof style of traditional architecture is a gesture to resolve the roof-line of a building in organic forms. This tendency fits into the Asian world-view, in which individual objects are typically seen as parts of larger, organic wholes. When shown a photograph, Asian subjects tended to concentrate disproportionately on the background and larger context of a scene. Americans tended to favor the foreground or most pronounced object.

Western culture and philosophy, too, tend to put more emphasis on the individual. Americans, in this sense, are less aware of context and relativity. This is the American ego - our great, enterprising strength. But it also may have hindered our ability to understand the world around us. Richard Nesbitt, one of the study's investigators, cites the inability of Western scientific minds to quickly grasp the nature of physical forces:

"Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did."

It may have taken thousands of years for our cultural tendencies to develop, but their effects are ubiquitous. Eye movements and recollections of the participants also tended in the same ways. Kyle Cave of UMass Amherst called this effect "striking", commenting that this kind of effect on low-level perceptual processes suggests another startling, perceptual relation to our cultural origins.

This is doubtless one of many significant effects tempered by culture. Even so, it's implications are astounding.

Visual Perception Tasks
Asian and Western Visual Perception
Eidos
A New Kind of Chop Suey