I suspect that the differences between the processing styles are less clear cut and less essential than this sort of interpretation would suggest. The explanations are devilishly difficult to pull off, and too often, they sound like the same old ‘West is individualist (or creative or absolutist…) and East (or whoever else) is collectivist (or conformist or relativist…).” That is, we tend to get very subtle data and research with very blunt theoretical instruments. Anthropological discussions of culture could lend so much more to this discussion IF anthropologists didn’t just throw up their hands in the face of this sort of data and complain about the nature of science (that is, treating the research methods or data, rather than the interpretation, as the source of problems like essentializing).

To me, the issue of stereotyping or unintended consequences is secondary to the intellectual issue of lousy explanatory mechanisms. For example, between the third and fourth paragraphs of the original article that Daniel is discussing, an absolutely Devil’s Canyon-sized leap is made between spatial perception of lines and boxes to notions of collective identity in ‘Asian culture’ and individualism in the West. To me, the answer to the profound differences is MUCH more likely to lie in the area of spatial perception, habitual forms of graphic representation, motor-perceptual skills, and the like. To link visual perception to some very abstract over-arching single-sentence description of ‘Asian culture’ (which, of course, is itself already a nearly impossible synthesis of the cultures of over one-half of the world’s population) is a tragically bad explanatory strategy.

I also doubt very much that the researchers can make assertions, as they do, about whether or not the subjects ‘perceive’ things differently (at the retina, as they suggest) or just ‘process’ visual information differently. I’m suspicious, firstly, because I’m convinced by ecological psychologists like James Gibson that ‘seeing’ is better understand as the active process of ‘looking’ accomplished by an entire perceptual system (a theoretical objection). Secondly, I’m dubious on empirical grounds because I don’t see the evidence that they’ve actually done any research on this subject (such as looking at visual scanning patterns on the puzzles). Thirdly, I am not inclined to support this argument because other recent research suggests that cultural differences actually DO affect very low-level perceptual sensation through a host of mechanisms, including downward-re-entrant synaptic links that modify the strength of perceptual stimuli.

Clearly, the research team is on to something. People are perceiving and attempting to solve the same puzzles in different fashion, and there may be significant statistical differences in the distribution of those strategies between populations (did all ‘Westerners’ try to solve the puzzles in the same way? It doesn’t sound like it is if people’s strategies correlated with the degree to which they expressed stereotypical ‘cultural attitudes.’ Mind you, this is differentiation in a sample N of 10!). I wouldn’t even object so much if the cultural explanation weren’t so ham-handed and elliptical. But I’m damn glad that you pointed this piece out to us, Daniel. I’ll be coming back to it as I try to work on some new stuff on the senses…