Another kind of cognitive style was referred to as 'field dependence or independence' by Herman Witkin. Field independence refers to an aptitude for disembedding figures from their contexts. Someone who finds words easily in word-search grids has considerable field independence. Those who are good at this are field independent. These are of course very artificial tasks, but field independent people would be just as quick at spotting someone in a real crowd.
Gender plays a part in perception too.
One gender-related influence concerns how our attention may be drawn to different aspects of a scene or image. Both subjects began scanning the painting from almost the same point, but the location, duration and sequence of their gaze were different. Unsurprisingly, the female observer paid much more attention to the male figure in the picture than the man did, and the male observer paid more attention to the female figure in the foreground than the female observer did. The woman observer focused only on the head of the foreground woman whilst the man focused on both the head and the upper body of this female figure. The female observer did not focus on the house and field at all, whilst the man did.