In cross-cultural psychology, an analytic cognitive style roughly describes a tendency to focus on a salient object, person, or piece of information (as in an image or a story) independently from the context in which it appears. A holistic cognitive style, in contrast, involves a tendency to focus more on the broader context and relationship between objects. Using a variety of tasks—such as one in which a scene with both focal objects and background elements is freely described—psychologists have reported evidence that participants from Western cultures (like the U.S.) tend to show a more analytic cognitive style, while those from East Asian cultures (like Japan) show a more holistic cognitive style. Analytic thinking and holistic thinking have been theorized to stem, respectively, from independent and interdependent cultural tendencies.