A direct correlate of visual perception, attention to visual information, varies across cultures Studies reveal that Americans attend to predominantly central focal objects visual information is processed in a field-independent way, paying less attention to background informationChinese participants make more saccade movements to the background of an image when looking at a photograph than American participantsAsians process visual information in a context-dependent / field dependent mannerAsians detect changes in the field more easily while failing to attend to focal object changes, whereas Westerners detect changes to salient objects more easily while being “change blind” to changes in the fieldEXPLAIN IN SIMPLE AND EASY TO UNDERSTAND LANGUAGE

differences in attention and processing of visual information suggest the existence of two distinct but culturally dependent cognitive styles of information processing: analytical and holistic Analytical versus holistic information-processing styles affect not only what is being looked at but also what types of connections are drawn between different stimuli (objects or people) and how these stimuli are categorizedBecause people from Western cultures focus more on individual objects when processing information, classifications based on rule-based categorical memberships are preferred; conversely, Eastern Asians classify events or objects according to relationships and family resemblance When classifying triplets of objects e.g. cow, chicken & grass American children, using a rule-based categorical classification, grouped together the cow with the chicken because both are animals (leaving the grass unpaired)Chinese children, using instead a relational type of classification, grouped the cow and grass together because cows eat grass (leaving the chicken unpaired) EXPLAIN THIS IN SIMPLE AND EASY TO UNDERSTAND LANGUAGE

The tendency to focus attention on individuals who are conspicuously different from us is referred to as the _____ effect.

Which of the following observations is consistent with the idea that learned changes in attention may sometimes serve an explorative function, rather than exploitative function?Group of answer choicesLearning of a CS-US relationship proceeds slower if the CS and US have previously been presented in an explicitly uncorrelated fashion.Under some circumstances, attention in humans appears to show conditioning-like properties, producing automatic changes in how we process complex visual stimuli.People tend to learn faster about predictive cues that have been predictive in other similar learning contexts.Learning an easy version of a discrimination can substantially improve subsequent discrimination on a harder version of the discrimination.Rats continue to orient towards a partially reinforced CS for longer than they do to either a continuously reinforced CS or a non-reinforced CS.

During covert and pre-saccadic attentional shifts, it is unclear how facilitation and suppression processes interact for target selection. A recent countermanding task pointed to greater suppression at unattended locations during trials with saccades compared to trials without saccades (i.e., fixation and successful stop trials), whereas target facilitation did not differ. It is unknown whether this finding is restricted to countermanding paradigms that involve inhibitory processes. To test this, we adapted Gaspelin and colleagues (2015)’s attention capture task where, within the same block, one location was primed with frequent line discrimination trials, and all locations were occasionally probed using letters report trials. Participants also performed a baseline condition without priming. We tested 15 participants and examined how performance at non-primed locations was affected by covert versus pre-saccadic attention in blocks of four or six items, as well as by position from the primed location and timing from saccade onset. For both attention conditions, letter report at non-primed locations was worse compared to baseline, demonstrating suppression, and letter report at primed location was better, demonstrating facilitation. In saccades trials, letter report was better at primed locations and worse at non-primed locations compared to fixation trials. The timing of this additional pre-saccadic suppression differed from saccadic suppression. In both attention conditions, suppression was greater when primed and non-primed locations were within the same hemifield or in diagonal opposite quadrants. These results confirmed that attention preceding saccade execution suppressed non-primed locations to a larger extent than covert attention, with the same spatial quadrant effect.

Why is understanding Visual Culture important? (answer in one sentence)