ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
published: 29 April 2010
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00006

Culture shapes eye movements for visuallyhomogeneous objects
David J. Kelly*, Sébastien Miellet and Roberto Caldara*
Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Edited by:
Luiz Pessoa, Indiana University, USA
Reviewed by:
Jules Davidoff, Goldsmiths, Universityof London, UK
Steve Most, University of Delaware,
USA*Correspondence:David J. Kelly and Roberto Caldara,
Department of Psychology, Universityof Glasgow, 58, Hillhead Street,
Glasgow G12 8QB, UK.
e-mail: davidk@psy.gla.ac.uk andr.caldara@psy.gla.ac.uk

Culture affects the way people move their eyes to extract information in their visual world. Adults
from Eastern societies (e.g., China) display a disposition to process information holistically,
whereas individuals from Western societies (e.g., Britain) process information analytically. In
terms of face processing, adults from Western cultures typically fixate the eyes and mouth, while
adults from Eastern cultures fixate centrally on the nose region, yet face recognition accuracy iscomparable across populations. A potential explanation for the observed differences relates tosocial norms concerning eye gaze avoidance/engagement when interacting with conspecifics.
Furthermore, it has been argued that faces represent a ‘special’ stimulus category and areprocessed holistically, with the whole face processed as a single unit. The extent to which theholistic eye movement strategy deployed by East Asian observers is related to holistic processing
for faces is undetermined. To investigate these hypotheses, we recorded eye movements ofadults from Western and Eastern cultural backgrounds while learning and recognizing visuallyhomogeneous objects: human faces, sheep faces and greebles. Both group of observers
recognized faces better than any other visual category, as predicted by the specificity of faces.
However, East Asian participants deployed central fixations across all the visual categories.
This cultural perceptual strategy was not specific to faces, discarding any parallel between theeye movements of Easterners with the holistic processing specific to faces. Cultural diversity
in the eye movements used to extract information from visual homogenous objects is rooted
in more general and fundamental mechanisms.
Keywords: culture, eye movements, face processing

INTRODUCTION
The term ‘culture’ is typically used to describe the particularbehaviors and beliefs that characterize a social or ethnic group.
Thus, by definition, culture represents a powerful deterministic
force, which is responsible for shaping the way people think andbehave. The potency of culture becomes evident when visiting
foreign countries, especially if that country lies beyond our own
continent. The cultural differences we observe can evoke feelings ofsurprise, intrigue and pleasure, but also we may experience confusion and anxiety. These intense feelings and emotions reflect the
profound diversity of culture and the power it exerts over humans
throughout ontogeny. Of course, such observations are not novel
and accordingly it is uncontroversial to claim that culture affects
thought and behavior. However, more recently a steadily growing
body of literature has yielded evidence to suggest that culture also
impacts upon visual perception.
Cultural differences of perception are best understood within
the holistic/analytical framework (see Nisbett and Miyamoto,2005 for a review). According to this view, adults from East Asian(EA; e.g., China, Korea and Japan) and Western Caucasian (WC;e.g., European and North American) cultures perceive the worldand subsequently process information in a fundamentally different manner. In the past decade systematic differences have beenfound in a variety of perceptual tasks and paradigms including:scene perception (e.g., Miyamoto et al., 2006), scene description

www.frontiersin.org(e.g., Masuda and Nisbett, 2001) and perceptual categorization(Norenzayan et al., 2002). All these studies point to a similar pattern of results, revealing that people from Western cultures process
information analytically by focusing on salient objects and using
categorical rules when organizing their environment. By contrast,
people from Eastern cultures process information in a more holisticmanner, showing interest in context and group objects according torelationships. Furthermore, pronounced cultural differences in perception have also been found in a comparison between European
vs. African adults (Davidoff et al., 2008). Although the root causesof these different processing styles are currently unresolved, someauthors (e.g., Masuda and Nisbett, 2001) have claimed that theorganization of social systems is responsible. Western cultures arethought to be individualistic and encourage the pursuit of personalgoals, which might lead to a bias for processing focal objects withina given context. By contrast, Eastern societies are more collectivistic
and emphasize the importance of the group over individuals, which
could lead to a tendency to think and process visual information
in a more global manner. Intriguingly, Davidoff and colleagues
report a striking local processing bias in the Namibian Himba tribe
as measured by a Navon figure task (Navon, 1977), despite the factthat this population lives in a collectivistic society. This observation
challenges the view that the organization of social systems is thecritical factor which accounts for the perceptual cultural differences observed in the holistic/analytical framework. Yet, regardless

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Kelly et al.

of potential theoretical explanations, the ever-growing catalog of
cultural findings is challenging long-held notions of universality
in perception and human cognition in general, which had previously been assumed.
In addition to presumed universality in general perception, theeye movement strategies employed by adults to encode and recognize facial identity has consistently been shown to be uniform.
Typically, adults make fixations to the eye and mouth regions forming a triangular scanpath (e.g., Yarbus, 1965). However, this pattern of behavior has always been recorded in adults from Westerncultures (e.g., Groner et al., 1984; Henderson et al., 2005). Blais
et al. (2008) recently challenged this supposition by recording eye
movements in an EA population. Contrary to expectations, EA participants fixated centrally on the nose region and generally avoided
the eyes. This finding is not just a further example of cultural variations in the extraction of visual information, but instead represents the first demonstration of fundamental differences between
peoples of different cultures when viewing biologically relevant
stimuli. Furthermore and somewhat intriguingly, the distributed
fixation patterns displayed by Westerners arguably resembles ananalytical processing style whereas the central fixation pattern seenin Easterners appears consistent with a holistic processing strategy.
Indeed, because retinal cell density and visual resolution decrease
sharply toward the peripheral visual field, the center of the face isthe most physiologically advantageous spatial position to capture
facial feature information holistically.
Currently, the relationship between the holistic and analytical eye
movement strategies respectively deployed by Eastern and Westernobservers and holistic vs. featural face processing is unclear. It is firstnecessary to distinguish between ‘holistic processing’ as definedwithin the cultural differences literature and ‘holistic face processing’ as described in the face recognition literature. Some researchers
have argued that in contrast to objects, faces are processed in a holistic manner (e.g., Young et al., 1987; Tanaka and Farah, 1993; Hole,
1994; Le Grand et al., 2004). In other words, rather than processing
facial features independently, the face is perceived and processed
as a whole unit or Gestalt. However, it has also been argued that
other-race faces may be processed more featurally/analytically (i.e.,
by attending to individual features; Tanaka and Farah, 1993). As
reported by Blais et al. (2008), the eye movement strategies usedby observers are not modulated by the race of face being viewed
suggesting that EA and WC adults extract information using different strategies, but the information used and underlying cognitive
processes are likely to be the same across populations. Regardlessof their culture, observers showed a comparable performance inface recognition.
In support of this view is the fact that that fixation location does
not unequivocally inform us about information use (Posner, 1980;
Kuhn and Tatler, 2005). In the case of face processing, although EA
adults may fixate centrally on the nose region under free viewing
conditions, this does not mean that the information contained inthis region is used to individuate faces. Indeed, available evidence
suggests that there is insufficient variation contained in this region
to allow accurate face recognition (Goldstein, 1979a,b; Caldara
and Abdi, 2006; Caldara et al., 2010). Evidence from other studies
suggests that the information used to accurately identify faces iscontained in the eye region (e.g., bubbles technique: Gosselin and

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Culture shapes eye movements

Schyns, 2001; Caldara et al., 2005). Therefore, it seems probable that
EA adults fixate the nose region when viewing faces, but actually
exploit the eye region, processed parafoveally, to recognize faces.
This hypothesis has recently been supported by Caldara and colleagues with a gaze-contingent moving aperture design.
Caldara et al. (2010) directly investigated the strategic differences
displayed by EA and WC adults by restricting the visual information available to participants with Gaussian apertures (termed
spotlights) sized 2°, 5° or 8°. In both the 2° and 5° conditions, theaperture was large enough for a single facial feature (e.g., eye ornose) to be viewed, but it was also small enough that the eyes andmouth were not visible when fixating the nose. By contrast, whenparticipants fixated the nose in the 8° condition, the mouth andeyes could be simultaneously viewed. Analysis of fixations strategies showed that the differences reported by Blais et al. (2008)
were abolished in the restrictive 2° and 5° conditions with both
populations of participants predominantly directing their fixations
to the eye region. However, in the 8° condition when the eyes werevisible when a nose region fixation was made, the EA participants
reverted to their preferred central landing position. The authors
concluded that the facial information, and most likely the cognitive
mechanisms required to accurately individuate conspecifics areinvariant, but the strategies used to extract this information arelikely to be modulated by social experience.
Whilst the purpose of the Caldara et al. (2010) study was toelucidate how EA participants were able to fixate the nose and still
accurately recognize faces, the function of the current study is tobetter understand why these differential strategies exist between
Eastern and Western populations. One possible explanation is thatthese divergent strategies are driven by simple social norms. In
the East it is can be considered rude to look a person in the eyesduring social interaction, while Westerners consider it impolite to
not engage eye contact during communication (Argyle and Cook,
1976). If such an assertion is correct, it is likely that the contrastingeye movement strategies reported for conspecifics’ faces will not
be found when participants view unfamiliar visually homogeneous categories of stimuli. However, if the differences observed inprevious studies represent a more fundamental biological disposition when exploring visual objects, we can expect to observe differences across all categories. Additionally, if the central fixation
strategy shown by Easterners is related to holistic face processing,
this eye movement strategy should not be deployed for sheep
faces or greebles, as holistic face processing is – by definition – notrecruited when processing non-human faces or objects. Thus, inthe present study the eye movements of WC and EA adult participants were recorded whilst viewing human faces, non-human faces(sheep) and an artificial category of stimuli, greebles (Gauthierand Tarr, 1997).

MATERIALS AND METHODSPARTICIPANTS

In total, 21 Western Caucasian adults (15 female; age range = 19–33
years) and 21 East Asian adults (10 female; age range = 20–27)
participated in the experiment. The WC adults were psychology
students from the Department of Psychology at the University ofGlasgow. The EA adults (20 Chinese, 1 Japanese) were all newly
arrived students at the University of Glasgow. They were recruited

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Kelly et al.

through advertisements in the university library and had been in
the UK for approximately 1–2 weeks at the time of testing. All
participants had normal or corrected to normal vision and were
reimbursed for their time at the rate of £6 per hour. Each participant
gave written informed consent and the protocol was approved by
the faculty ethics committee.
MATERIALS

Face stimuli were obtained from the KDEF (Lundqvist et al., 1998)
and AFID (Bang et al., 2001) databases and consisted of 24 East
Asian and 24 Western Caucasian identities holding neutral facial
expressions and contained equal numbers of males and females.
The images were 390 × 382 pixels in size, subtending 15.6° of visual
angle horizontally and 15.3° of visual angle vertically, which represents the size of a real face (approximately 19 cm in height).
All images were cropped around the face to remove clothing andwere devoid of distinctive features (scarf, jewelry, facial hair etc.).
Sheep stimuli were obtained from Prof. Mike Kendrick (Universityof Cambridge) and consisted of 48 unique identities. The images
were 420 × 382 pixels in size subtending 16.8° of visual angle horizontally and 15.3° of visual angle vertically. Greebles were obtained
courtesy of Prof. Michael J. Tarr (Brown University, http://www.
tarrlab.org/) and consisted of 48 unique identities. The images were
420 × 382 pixels in size subtending 16.8° of visual angle horizontallyand 15.3° of visual angle vertically. All images were mounted ona white background.
All images were viewed at a distance of 70 cm. This reflects anatural distance during human face-to-face interaction (Hall, 1966)
and has been successfully used in previous studies (Blais et al., 2008;
Caldara et al., 2010). Human and sheep faces were aligned on theeye and mouth positions using psychomorph software (Tiddeman
et al., 2001). Luminance was normalized for all images and they
were presented on a 800 × 600 pixel gray background displayedon a Dell P1130 19″ CRT monitor with a refresh rate of 170 Hz.
Presentation of stimuli was controlled by code custom written in
MatLab (The MathWorks, MA, USA). It is important to note thatvisually homogeneous categories were used as they permit both thenormalization of visual information complexity between categories and the averaging of eye movement strategies for individual
exemplars within categories.
EYE TRACKING

Eye movements were recorded at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz with
the SR Research Desktop-Mount EyeLink 2K eyetracker (witha chin/forehead-rest), which has an average gaze position errorof about 0.25°, a spatial resolution of 0.01o and a linear output
over the range of the monitor used. Only the dominant eye ofeach participant was tracked although viewing was binocular.
The experiment was implemented in Matlab (R2006a), using thePsychophysics (PTB-3) and EyeLink Toolbox extensions (Brainard,
1997; Cornelissen et al., 2002). Calibrations of eye fixations wereconducted at the beginning of the experiment using a nine-point
fixation procedure as implemented in the EyeLink API (see EyeLink
Manual) and using Matlab software. Calibration was validated with
the EyeLink software and repeated when necessary until the optimal calibration criterion was reached. At the beginning of eachtrial, participants were instructed to fixate a dot at the center of

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Culture shapes eye movements

the screen to perform a drift correction. If the drift correction was
more than 1°, a new calibration was launched to insure optimal
recording quality.
PROCEDURE

All 42 participants completed human face, sheep face and greeble
stimulus conditions. The order in which conditions were completed
was counterbalanced across participants. All participants beganeach stimulus condition with a training session, which comprised
four examples of the images that would be displayed in that condition. Importantly, these images were sourced from the original
databases from which the final stimulus sets were taken, but they
did not form part of the final sets and were not displayed again
subsequently. The purpose of the training session was simply tofamiliarize the participants with the stimuli.
Participants were informed that they would be presented with aseries of images to learn and subsequently recognize. They were also
told that they would be given two recognition blocks per stimulus
condition. In each block, participants were instructed to learn 12
images. After a 30-s pause, a series of 24 images (12 targets from thelearning phase plus 12 foils) were presented and participants wereasked to indicate as quickly and as accurately as possible whether
each stimulus was a target or foil by pressing designated keys (a, l)on the keyboard with the index fingers of their left and right hands.
For the human face condition, faces of the two races were presented in separate blocks, with the order of presentation for sameand other-race blocks being counterbalanced across participants.
Response buttons were counterbalanced across participants.
In contrast to previous studies (Blais et al., 2008; Caldara et al.,2010) where the faces displayed during learning and recognition
phases contained different emotional expressions, participants
viewed the same pictures during learning and recognition phases.
This was simply because we had only picture per identity for sheep
faces so could not change images across phases in this condition.
We elected to not change images across phases in the other stimulus
conditions to maintain consistency and to allow direct comparisonof results across stimulus conditions.
Each test trial started with the presentation of a central fixation cross. Then four crosses were presented, one in the middle ofeach of the four quadrants of the computer screen. These crosses
allowed the experimenter to check that the calibration was still
accurate. In that way, calibration was validated between each test
trial. Following this check, a final central fixation cross that served
to monitor drift correction was displayed. Following these checks,
a stimulus was then presented on the computer screen. All stimuli
were presented for 5 s duration in the learning phase and until theparticipant made a key press response in the recognition phase. To
prevent anticipatory strategies, images were randomly presented at
different locations of the computer screen. Each stimulus was subsequently followed by the six fixation crosses, as described above,
which preceded the next stimulus.
DATA ANALYSES

Only correct trials were analyzed. Fixation distribution maps werecomputed individually for WC and EA participants, for each stimulus condition and separately for the learning and recognition
phases. The fixation maps were computed by summing, acrossApril 2010 | Volume 1 | Article 6 | 3

Kelly et al.

Culture shapes eye movementsall (correct) trials, the fixation location coordinates (x, y) acrosstime. Since more than one pixel is processed during a fixation,
we smoothed the resulting fixation distributions with a Gaussian
kernel with a sigma of 15 pixels. Then, the fixation maps of all theparticipants belonging to the same cultural group were summed
together separately for each face condition, resulting in group
fixation maps.
We Z-scored the resulting group fixation maps by assuming identical WC and EA eye movement distributions for a particular facerace as the null hypothesis. Consequently, we pooled the fixation
distributions of participants for both groups and used the mean
and the standard deviation for each stimulus condition to separately
normalize the data. Finally, to clearly reveal the difference of fixation
patterns across participants of different cultures, we subtracted thegroup fixation maps of the EA participants from the WC participants
and Z-scored the resulting distribution. To establish significance,
we used a robust statistical approach correcting for multiple comparisons in the fixation map space, by applying a two-tailed Pixel
test (Chauvin et al., 2005; Zcrit > |4.38|; p < 0.05) on the differential
fixation maps. Finally, for each condition we individually extracted
the average Z-score values for all participants within each regionof interest showing significance in the differential fixation maps toestimate Cohen’s d effect sizes (Cohen, 1988).

RESULTS
ACCURACYA 2 (Culture of Observer: British or Chinese) × 3 (Stimuli: humanfaces, sheep faces, greebles) ANOVA was conducted on participant’s
recognition accuracy. The ANOVA yielded main effect of Stimuli[F(2, 40) = 39.778, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.499] only. Post hoc analysis
conducted on accuracy for stimulus categories showed that WC
and EA participant’s performance was comparable for all stimulus
categories with both groups recognizing human faces most accurately, followed by greebles and sheep faces.

REACTION TIME

A 2 (Culture of Observer: British or Chinese) × 3 (Stimuli: humanfaces, sheep faces, greebles) ANOVA was conducted on participant’s
reaction time for correct responses. The ANOVA yielded main effectsof Culture of Observer [F(1, 40) = 37.809, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.267] andStimuli [F(2, 40) = 155.714, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.395]. Post hoc analysis
revealed that regardless of culture, participants responded fastest forhuman faces followed by greebles and then sheep faces. EA participants also took longer to respond in all conditions (see Figure 1).
NUMBER OF FIXATIONS

A 2 (Culture of Observer: British or Chinese) × 3 (Stimuli: humanfaces, sheep faces, greebles) ANOVA was conducted on participant’s
number of fixations. The ANOVA yielded main effects of Stimuli[F(2, 40) = 12.172, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.092] with participants fromboth groups making fewer fixations for human faces relative tosheep and greebles (see Table 1).
EYE MOVEMENTS

Similar to previous reports, when viewing human faces WC participants systematically fixated the eye and mouth regions during learning and the eye region during recognition. By contrast,
the EA participants primarily fixated on the nose region during
learning and recognition phases. The strategic group differences,
as revealed by a two-tailed pixel test (Zcrit > |4.64|, p < 0.05), areclearly illustrated in the difference maps (see Figure 2). Areas fixatedabove chance are delimited by white borders and depict the relative fixation biases following map subtraction (WC–EA). Strategic
differences for WC and EA faces were not explored as a previous
study (Blais et al., 2008) showed that fixations patterns were notmodulated by the race of the face stimuli.
Turning to the novel categories of stimuli, for sheep faces it
is evident from Figure 2 that the strategic differences found forhuman faces are also observed for sheep. WC participants cluster

Accuracy and Reacon Time
3

2

WC observers

1.8

2

RT WC

1.4

RT EA

d'

1.2
1.5

1
0.8

1

EA observers

1.6

RT (secs)

2.5

0.6
0.4

0.5

0.2
0

0
Human Faces

Sheep Faces

GreeblesFIGURE 1 | Accuracy and reaction time for all stimulus conditions.

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Culture shapes eye movements

Table 1 | Number of fixations (standard deviations) for each all stimulus conditions.
Condition

Learning

CultureStimulus
FixationsWestern
HF

SF

Recognition
EasternG

HF

SF

WesternG

HF

SF

Eastern
G

HF

SF

G

13.80

14.37

12.68

12.04

13.25

12.58

2.92

4.48

3.90

2.76

5.00

4.21

(2.97)(2.32)(2.40)(1.68)(2.16)(2.22)(1.01)(1.20)(1.43)(1.25)(2.22)(1.69)FIGURE 2 | Fixation maps for WC and EA participants for all stimulus conditions.

their fixations around the eye and mouth regions, whereas EA
participants fixate more centrally. Most surprisingly, strategic differences between groups are even found for greebles. EAs centered
more fixations between the two prominent features (head and body
limbs) whilst WCs landed their fixations directly on the central
head limb.
In order to determine the magnitude of fixation biases, Z-scoredfixation averages for each observer that landed within the significant
regions were extracted. Effect sizes (Cohen’s d) were then calculated from these values to reveal that fixation biases were large androbust across learning and recognition in all stimulus conditions(see Table 2).

DISCUSSION
It is clear from the fixation maps displayed in Figure 2 that thestrategic differences reported for face processing tasks in previous
studies also extend to visually homogeneous categories with which
participants had little or no prior familiarity. Unequivocally, any
links between the eye movement strategies employed and holistic faceprocessing are unsupported as both populations displayed the same
pattern of fixations across all stimulus categories. The findings forwww.frontiersin.org

human faces replicates previous reports with WC participants primarily exploring the eye and mouth regions, whilst EA participants
fixated centrally on the nose region (Blais et al., 2008; Caldara et al.,2010). Somewhat surprisingly these distinct strategies extended tosheep faces, with both groups of participants employing the same
strategies used for human faces. Even more unexpectedly, clear andconsistent differences in fixations were also found for greebles.
In the case of sheep faces, it could be argued that participants
simply transferred their favored strategy for human faces and perhaps a similar result would be yielded with any category of nonhuman faces or face-like stimuli (e.g., cars in front-view, houses
with window-eyes and door-mouth etc.). According to this interpretation, when participants are confronted with a stimulus that is
novel but possesses a familiar configuration, individuals will deploy
the strategy that they typically use for more familiar categories ofstimuli (i.e., conspecifics’ faces). For greebles, however, the result ismore intriguing as the stimulus category was completely novel to allparticipants, yet group differences were still displayed. EA participant’s fixations landed approximately in the center of the object’s
prominent features whereas WC participant’s fixations actuallylanded on salient features. It has been argued by some authors

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Culture shapes eye movements

Table 2 | Cohen’s d values for significantly fixated areas.
Human faces
Area

Eyes

Sheep faces
Nose

Eyes

Greebles
Nose

Head

Center

Phase

Learn

Reco

Learn

Reco

Learn

Reco

Learn

Reco

Learn

Reco

Learn

Reco

d

1.05

1.96

1.34

1.87

0.88

1.04

0.80

0.83

0.78

1.38

0.92

1.22

(e.g., Kanwisher, 2000) that greebles are ‘face-like’ and therefore thesame ‘strategy transfer’ argument proposed for sheep faces could
also be applicable for greebles. However, this view is not one that weendorse as greebles do not possess eyes or any obvious mouth. It is
our contention that in the absence of such attributes, which clearly
define a face as such, it becomes obligatory to classify greebles as
non-face objects. If this view is accepted, then it can be tentatively
concluded that the differing strategies observed for human faces are
not solely driven by eye gaze avoidance/engagement social norms as
had been proposed. From the current data it is impossible to completely rule out the social norm explanation for human faces at thevery least. However, Jack et al. (2009) found that when categorizing
expressive faces by emotion, EA adults rely almost exclusively on
the eye region when making judgments. This strongly supports
the view that EA adults do not inherently avoid eye gaze and thatthe central fixation pattern reflects a cultural perceptual tuning invisual (homogenous) object identification.
If factors other than simple gaze avoidance are involved, it is ofcourse necessary to delineate what these might be. The most obvious candidate is general differences in perceptual processing style as
described earlier. It was noted by Blais et al. (2008) that the triangular
scanpath displayed by WCs was indicative of an analytical processing
style, while the central fixation strategy used by EAs resembles a holistic
processing strategy. Along with the social norms hypothesis, Blais et al.
(2008) advocated that the general differences observed in perception
might extend to human faces and therefore account for the pattern ofresults reported. The eye movement data from the current study lend
weight to this argument as participants from both cultural groups
display strategies for all stimuli that are consistent with these processing styles when viewing visual objects (but see Rayner et al., 2007;
Evans et al., 2009 for conflicting results from scene perception studies).
However, it is important to concede that it remains unclear whether
the pattern of results observed in adulthood are indeed shaped bycultural forces or whether genetic factors govern the differential eye
movement behavior. It is essential to test different populations, suchas adopted Chinese adults living in Western societies and also acrossdevelopmental age groups to clarify when differences emerge andhow they are shaped by the cultural environment.

Linking eye movements to cognitive processes must be donewith great caution. The eye movement data reported in the current
study cannot inform us about the cognitive processes underlying face or object recognition. Indeed, as in our previous study(Blais et al., 2008) the recognition accuracy and reaction times
across populations were essentially identical, suggesting that theunderlying processes used by both groups are most probably thesame. Our contention that the holistic and analytical eye movement
strategies do not relate to holistic and featural face processing isstrongly supported by the fact that both populations’ strategies
extended to objects with which they had little or no prior familiarity. Holistic face processing is typically attributed to experience
with own-race faces processed less holistically than other-race faces(Michel et al., 2006), yet we observed the same eye movement
strategies for sheep and greebles (and other-race faces), indicating that natural eye movements cannot straightforwardly isolate
the underlying cognitive processes. However, eye movements still
remain an invaluable technique to understand how the visual system gathers information and to isolate diagnostic features used in
information processing.
In conclusion, adults from different cultural backgrounds extract
visual information in a fundamentally different manner. Whereas
previous studies have shown differences for biologically relevant
stimuli (conspecifics), the current study has extended these findings to biologically irrelevant (sheep) and non-biological stimuli(greebles). Interestingly, neither strategy appears to be more effective
than the other, as both groups demonstrate comparable behavioral
performance across recognition tasks with a range of stimuli. The
differences reported are not trivial, but instead represent robust
and consistent visual information extraction styles that further
challenge notions of universality in perception.

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Frontiers in Psychology | Perception Science

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSDavid J. Kelly was supported by The Economic and Social ResearchCouncil (RES-000-22-3338); Sébastien Miellet was supported by
The Economic and Social Research Council and Medical ResearchCouncil (ESRC/RES-060-25-0010); Roberto Caldara by both funding bodies.

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Conflict of Interest Statement: The
authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or
financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 22 January 2010; paper pending
published: 11 February 2010; accepted: 24
February 2010; published online: 29 April
2010.
Citation: Kelly DJ, Miellet S and Caldara
R (2010) Culture shapes eye movements for visually homogeneous objects.
Front. Psychology 1:6. doi: 10.3389/
fpsyg.2010.00006
This article was submitted to Frontiers in
Perception Science, a specialty of Frontiersin Psychology.
Copyright © 2010 Kelly, Miellet andCaldara. This is an open-access article
subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and theFrontiers Research Foundation, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution,and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source
are credited.

April 2010 | Volume 1 | Article 6 | 7