A processing advantage associated with analytic perceptual tendencies: European Americans outperform Asians on multiple object tracking

a r t i c l e i n f o Analytic visual processing and holistic visual processing have been conceptualized in terms of attention to focal objects vs. the background. We expand the study of perceptual biases associated with these attentional patterns using the multiple object tracking task, which measures people's ability to track multiple moving target objects amidst otherwise identical distractors. We test two competing hypotheses: (1) Asians' more frequent eye saccades will enable them to quickly cycle through the multiple target objects before the objects move too far away, giving them another perceptual advantage; and (2) European Americans' tendency to focus attention on the focal objects while inhibiting attention to less important objects might facilitate tracking of multiple moving objects. We find that European Americans significantly outperform Asians on multiple object tracking. The research expands the conceptualization of analytic processing and holistic processing to include selective attention as a key component, a facet that has not been previously identified. Introduction Over the past decade, psychologists have documented substantial cultural variation in basic visual attention. An attentional pattern in which perceivers devote more attention to focal objects than to background objects and do not perceptually bind focal objects with the background is called analytic, and is common among people in European American contexts. In contrast, an attentional pattern in which per-ceivers distribute attention evenly to focal and background objects and bind focal objects with the background is called holistic, and is common Attentional differences are evident even in basic eye movements—Americans make more eye fixations to focal objects in a visual scene, whereas Asians make more eye saccades to background objects (Chua, Boland, & Nisbett, 2005). The terms analytic and holistic do not refer to causal latent constructs at the level of the individual – performance on different tasks is often uncorrelated across individuals (Na et al., 2010) – but instead are descriptive labels that summarize the patterns of attention that are common within particular cultural contexts (Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van Heerden, 2003; Cervone, 2005). The differences between Asians' and European Americans' atten-tional styles can help explain cultural differences in some important perceptual biases. For example, Asians have greater expertise at detecting changes in a scene, and thus are less susceptible to change blindness In the present research, we use another perceptual task – one that involves dynamic selective attention – and ask whether the holistic attention that …