Related article: than East Asians when the animal was displayed against new background. plausible interpretation is that, compared with Americans, the Japanese encoded the scenes more holistically, binding information about the objects with the backgrounds, so that the unfamiliar new background adversely affected the retrieval of the familiar animal. The difference in attending to objects vs. context also was shown in perceptual judgment task, the Rod and Frame test (7) American and Chinese participants looked down long box. At the end of the box was rod whose orientation could be changed and frame around the rod that could be moved independently of the rod. The participants? task was to judge when the rod was vertical. Chinese participants? judgments of verticality were more dependent on the context, in that their judgments were more influenced by the position of the frame than were those of American participants. In change blindness study, Masuda and Nisbett asked American and Japanese participants to view sequence of still photos and also to view animated vignettes of complex visual scenes (unpublished data) Changes in focal object information (e.g. color and shape of foregrounded objects) and contextual information (e.g. location of background details) were introduced during the sequence of presentations. Overall, the Japanese reported more changes in the contextual details than did the Americans, whereas the Americans reported more changes in the focal objects than did the Japanese. This finding has at least two possible explanations (see ref. 9) On one account, the Asian participants had more detailed mental representations of the backgrounds, whereas the Westerners had more detailed representations of the focal objects. On the other account, the mental representations did not differ with culture, but the two groups differed in their accuracy for detecting deviation between their mental representation of the background/focal object and the current stimulus. Clearly, there were systematic differences between the Americans? and the East Asians? performance in the causal perception, memory, and judgment studies. However, it is unclear whether the effects occur at the level of encoding, retrieval, mental comparison, or differences in reporting bias. To identify the stages in perceptual-cognitive processing at which the cultural differences might arise, consider what is known about scene perception:(i) Within 100ms of first viewing a scene, people can often encode the gist of the scene, e.g. "picnic" or "building" (10) (ii) People then construct mental model of the scene in working memory (11). The mental representation is not an exact rendering of the original scene and is usually incomplete in detail (12-13).(iii) Although the initial eye fixation may not be related to the configuration of the scene, the following fixations are to the most informative regions of the scene for the task at hand (14) The fixation positions are important because foveated regions are likely to been coded in greater detail than peripheral regions (15) (iv) The mental representation of the scene is then transferred to and consolidated in long-term memory. (v) Successful retrieval from long-term memory relies on appropriate retrievalcues.(vi)Duringretrieval,therecalledinformationmay be filtered by experimental demands and cultural expectations. Past studies (3-8) have failed to establish whether the effects are due to differences in perception, Generic Depo-Medrol encoding, consolidation, recall, comparison judgments, or reporting bias. To address this issue, we monitored eye movements of the American and the Chinese participants while they viewed scenes containing objects on relatively complex backgrounds. We chose this measure because eye fixations reflect the allocation of attention in fairly direct manner. Moreover, we have relatively little awareness of how our eyes move under normal viewing conditions. If differences in culture influence how participants actually view and encode the scenes, there will be differences in the pattern of saccades and fixations in the eye movements of the members of the two cultures. [Saccades are rapid, ballistic eye movements that shift gaze from one fixation to another (15). In particular, we would expect Americans to spend more time looking at the focal objects and less time looking at the context than the Chinese participants. Furthermore, Buy Depo-Medrol if the Chinese participants perceive the picture more holistically and bind contextual features with features of the focal object, they might make more total saccades when surveying the scene Buy Depo-Medrol Online than the Americans. On the other hand, if no eye movement differences emerge between the two cultures, then previous findings of memory and judgment differences are likely due to Depo-Medrol Online what happens at later stages, e.g. during memory retrieval or during reporting. Fig. 1. (omitted) Sample pictures presented in the study. Thirty-six pictures with a single foregrounded object (animals or nonliving entities) on realistic backgrounds were presented to participants. Methods