Week 5: Cognition and perception

Question 1

Taxonomic categorization

Answer 1

The grouping of items according to perceived similarities

Question 2

Thematic categorization

Answer 2

The grouping of items based on their causal, temporal, or spatial relationship

Question 3

How do categorization strategies differ between Westerners and East Asians?

Answer 3

When faced with the following problem: which of these 3 is the least like the other two: a dog, a carrot, and a rabbit….? Westerners and East Asians tend to give different types of responses:
- Westerners: the carrot, because the rabbit and the dog are both animals.
- East Asians: the dog, because rabbits eat carrots and therefore they have a relationship.
- Westerners tend to give taxonomic- and East Asians tend to give thematic categorization responses.

Question 4

What are the differences in thinking styles between Westerners and East Asians?

Answer 4

Analytic thinking is a type of thinking characterized by a focus on objects and their attributes (it is independent from context and abstract rules can explain and predict behaviour), while holistic thinking is a type of thinking characterized by a focus on the context as a whole, objects are also perceived in relation to their context and knowledge about behaviour is based on experience. Westerners tend to be analytic thinkers while East Asians tend to be holistic thinkers.

Question 5

What are the possible causes for the differences in thinking styles?

Answer 5

Proximal: people from different cultures are exposed to different social experiences and to cultural products that emphasize analytically or holistically perceived selves (such as Superman being emphasized as unique). The way we think of ourselves extends to how we think about objects.
Distal: philosophical traditions as they were present in ancient Greece which is more analytical (property of gravity, syllogisms, abstract rules all emphasize separation) and Confucian China which is holistic (magnetism, role of moon in tides, harmony among people and nature all are continually interacting and changing)

Question 6

What is important to remember about self-concepts and their causes?

Answer 6

Self-concepts don’t “cause” different thinking styles – they likely co-evolve / co-develop within people depending on their experiences. E.g., talking about objects, using more nouns, and retelling the day with children from an I perspective both require and afford an independent self and analytic thinking.

Question 7

Which thinking style is the default?

Answer 7

Holistic thinking is more prevalent in many countries and cultures even in American babies. It is likely that analytical thinking is learned through contact with Western society and education systems.

Question 8

What is the cultural variation in attention?

Answer 8

Attention is the act or state of applying the mind to something or directing cognitive activity a certain way. Analytic thinkers, who perceive the world as consisting of discrete components, focus their attention on separate parts of a scene. In contrast, holistic thinkers, who perceive the world as an integrated whole, direct their attention more broadly, across an entire scene. East Asians see foreground objects as part of the background context, whereas Westerners focus on foreground objects, disregarding the background

Question 9

What is the difference in patterns of thinking in the Rorshach test?

Answer 9

Europeans tended to describe what they saw based on a single aspect of the image, while Chinese gave whole-card responses and describing what they saw in the entire image.

Question 10

What is the rod and frame test?

Answer 10

a test that is comprised of a rod and a surrounding frame that are both rotated in some way. The goal is to say whether the rod is pointing straight up, which can only be done by ignoring the frame’s position and just focusing on the rod. Analytic
thinkers, who are high in field independence (separate objects from background fields), can do this well. In contrast, holistic thinkers, high in field dependence (tendency to view objects as bound to their backgrounds), cannot.

Question 11

How did American and Japanese participants perceive the foreground and background of images?

Answer 11

• Japanese made about 60% more references to background images than Americans, who spoke more
  about a fish at the center of the images.
• After this, the participants viewed additional scenes with the same central fish, but either the same or a different background as earlier. They were asked whether they had seen the fish before.
• Americans: regardless of background, recognition of the fish was pretty much the same.
• Japanese: were much more likely to recognize the fish when it had the original background.

Question 12

How do Japanese and American participants perceive the emotions of central figures?

Answer 12

• participants were wearing an eye-tracker and shown images with a central figure and other individuals in the background, which could have consistent emotion facial expressions with the main figure
• for Americans the expression of the background individuals had no impact on emotional expressions, with more focus on the central figure
• for Japanese, the judgements of the central figure’s emotions were influence by background people and spend longer focusing on the background

Question 13

What are saccades?

Answer 13

rapid eye movements in which the gaze shifts quickly from one fixation point to another. Research has shown that East Asians show more saccades than Americans, indicating that they scan an entire scene more thoroughly.

Question 14

How do artistic preferences differ between cultures?

Answer 14

East Asian paintings emphasize the context by incorporating small figures and scenes with high horizons. In contrast, Western paintings have relatively large central figures and low horizons. The same differences were found when kids were asked to draw a landscape

Question 15

What are the different types of attributions?

Answer 15

Dispositional attributions = explaining behaviour in terms of someone’s underlying qualities.
Situational attribution = explaining behaviour in terms of contextual factors
Fundamental attribution error= the tendency to ignore situational information while focusing on dispositional information in
explaining other people’s behaviour. It turned out not to be that fundamental (universal) as first thought

Question 16

How did Indians and Americans explain when someone behaved in an expected or deviant manner?

Answer 16

American: the older the participants, the more likely they were to make dispositional attributions (and to make the
fundamental attribution error). Indian: the older the participants, the more situational attributions they made.

Question 17

Rule-based learning

Answer 17

making decisions based on fixed, abstract rules and laws, related to analytical thinking

Question 18

Associative reasoning

Answer 18

making decisions based on the relationships between objects and events, related to holistic thinking

Question 19

What has research found about different types of reasoning?

Answer 19

European Americans, Asian-Americans, and East Asians were shown groups of flowers and target flowers, they had to identify which flower is with which group. Some concluded that flower A goes with group 2 due to the shape of the stems while others argued that flower A goes in group 1 because of the resemblance of the flower. European Americans base their decisions on rule-based reasoning, East-Asians based their decisions on associative reasoning while Asian Americans fell in the middle of the groups

Question 20

How is the approach to tolerate contradiction different for analytic thinkers compared to holistic thinkers?

Answer 20

The tendency for analytic thinkers to view objects as separate and internally consistent means it’s hard
for them to tolerate contradiction. Aristotle also derived the law of non-contradiction-> a statement cannot be both false and true. In contrast, the tendency for holistic thinkers to view the world as consisting of fluid and interrelated parts leads to their belief that contradiction is natural, and they accept it in themselves and their world (naïve dialecticism- in line with Taoism).

Question 21

How did research investigate contradiction?

Answer 21

• were presented with two opposing arguments, most participants found one more convincing when only one was shown
• when both arguments were shown: Americans were more convinced in the argument, denying the contradiction, while Chinese became less convinced in one argument and more convinced in the other argument
• they were reminded that the world is contradictory

Question 22

How are Chinese and American students in making future predictions?

Answer 22

When shown graphs of past performance of certain trends, they were asked what they thought would happen for the next years. Chinese were twice as likely as Americans to predict that the trend would reverse direction in the future, while Americans were more likely to predict the trend would continue as the same directions in the past

Question 23

How did performance change for Europeans and Asians in an IQ test?

Answer 23

• Completed the first half without speaking, for the other half either had to think aloud or repeat the alphabet while completing the items (articulatory suppression)
• European: did just as well when being silent as when thinking out loud, but the articulatory suppression task interfered with their thinking.
• Asian: did worse thinking aloud but were unaffected by the
  articulatory suppression task (unaffected by an unrelated task)

Question 24

How could these results be explained?

Answer 24

In analytic thinking, there is a focus on separate parts, each part can be described separately and sequentially. This means that talking is thus intertwined with speaking (linked to Socratic Dialogue). However, with holistic thinking there is attention to the whole, not easy to describe multiple relations at once. So talking could interfere with thinking.

Question 25

How does communication differ across cultures?

Answer 25

Includes explicit verbal expression and implicit nonverbal cues. In high-context cultures like East Asia, people are deeply involved with one another, and they share
information that guides their behavior so they can be less explicit. Also more focus on non-veerbal cues. Low-context culture (North America): less involvement among individuals, and therefore less shared information to guide behavior so they have to communicate in more explicit details and focus on the meaning.

Question 26

What did other research find about explicit and implicit cues across cultures?

Answer 26

Japanese and American participants listened to words that were either pleasant or unpleasant with either a pleasant-sounding tone or an unpleasant-sounding tone.
Sometimes the tone matched the word, and other times it was the opposite. They were instructed to say whether the word was pleasant or unpleasant or say whether the tone was pleasant or unpleasant. Americans had a harder time making judgements about the tone than the words so they focus on the meaning, while Japanese had a harder time making judgements about the words than the tone so focus on the implicit.

Question 27

What is the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity?

Answer 27

This explains the connection between cognition and language. Strong form is that language determines how people think and we are unable to do much thinking on a topic if there are not the relevant words available to us (universally rejected because thought occurs outside of language). Language is said to coerce thought.
The weak form is that language influences how people think (like colour perception, odour perception, agency, spatial and numerical). Language thus influences thought.

Question 28

How is there cultural variation in the number of colour labels that languages have?

Answer 28

All languages have at least 2 words (roughly corresponding to black and white) but not all languages have more. However, there is a potential indication for universalism: as the number of distinctions (labels) increases, similar colours are added to the spectrum (languages with 3 colour words usually have red next to black and white). Seen as more systematic, as colour terms increase, the distinctions are similar and focal points are similar.

Question 29

How is there cultural variation in perceiving colours?

Answer 29

Languages differ in their colour lexicons, and different categories affect people’s categorical perception of colours. This is perceiving stimuli as belonging to separate and discrete categories, even though they may gradually differ from each other along a continuum.

Question 30

How can language influence categorical perception?

Answer 30

• Berinmo and English-speakers were shown a target chip and were asked which chips were more similar to the target. Both chips were equally distant in hue from the target but either had different colour categories or the same
• For English categories, they were more likely to choose the chip in the same colour category as the target while for Berinmo speakers were equally likely to choose either
• For Berinmo boundaries, the Berinmo speakers distinguish between the two chips while the English do not

Question 31

How can language influence odor perception?

Answer 31

The English language is relatively impoverished in the descriptions of odors (more source-based for odour and abstract for colour). The Jahai (a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers) have a much larger vocabulary of olfaction words and research has found that they are better in recognizing different odors (perhaps because of this). In contrast, Americans were found to be better at describing colors (and they have more color words than the Jahai). Shows that odors are expressible in language if there is the terminology.

Question 32

How can language influence perceptions of agency?

Answer 32

• in English it is normal to attribute behaviour to someone taking an action while in Spanish more common to use passive constructions when behaviour is unintentional
• Had to watch videos of people involved in actions, and had to recall which one did the action
• When intentional, English and Spanish speakers were equally accurate, but when unintentional the English were more accurate than Spanish speakers as they use passive constructions

Question 33

Relativistic orientation (egocentric perception)

Answer 33

indicating locations with words relative to the speakers (left, front)

Question 34

Absolute orientation (geocentric perception)

Answer 34

indicating locations with words independent of the speaker (North, South

Question 35

How does language influence spatial perception?

Answer 35

Dutch (relativistic orientation) and Guugu Yimithirr (absolute orientation) speakers were shown a row of figures of a cow, a pig, and a person on a table. The table was against the north wall and they were then asked to go to a different room with a similar scene, but against the south wall. They were told to arrange the figures to create the same scene as in the first room.
Dutch: arranged the scene based on their own position relative to the figures.
Guugu Yimithirr: arranged the scene using cardinal (compass) directions, so the scene was turned around. So language determines restructuring human cognition, spatial perception could also be used in non-linguistic cognitive tasks.

Question 36

How do Piraha have different numerical cognition?

Answer 36

a tribe that has a number system that contains only 1, 2, and ‘many’. It has been studied to investigate
numerical cognition. In all kinds of different tasks they completed, their number of errors increased
with the magnitude of the numbers they were asked to estimate. They were able to distinguish between distinct quantities so show rough quantity estimation skills but not between similar quantities, shows that rough quantity estimation is innate

Question 37

What are the exact findings from the numerical cognition students of the Piraha people?

Answer 37

• Absence of number words limited Piraha’s ability to perform a variety of numerical tasks.
• Piraha participants have restimation skills, they know 12 is larger than 8 but they can not distinguish between 8 and 9.
• Support for linguistic determinism as language and numerical thinking are closely related.

Question 38

Why is there a distinction in analytic and holistic perception between West and East Asia?

Answer 38

• US scenes were found to be less complex and ambiguous, the number of objects in the scenes were analysed and more objects were found
• When primed with Japanese environments, both Japanese and American participants attended more to contextual information than they did when primed with American scenes

Question 39

Name 3 ways in which analytic and holistic thinking are different

Answer 39

Analytic: attention is on different parts of a scene, field independence, objects separated from their background fields
Holistic: attention is broad and across the entire scene, objects as bound to their backgrounds, field dependence

Question 40

How exactly do Japanese and Americans see the scene differently?

Answer 40

More eye movements on the whole scene, which suggests that the cultural differences are outside of our voluntary control. It has also been found in other studies that there is a higher number of saccades among Asians (quick gaze shifts between fixation points = more systematic scanning of entire scene) – saccadic movements are rather outside conscious control. People in different cultures are not seeing the same things when looking at identical scenes.

Question 41

How can different thinking styles influence attributions?

Answer 41

Analytic thinking involves identifying underlying attributes, so you consider inner stable qualities. So you make dispositional attributions.
Holistic thinking involves identifying situational influences, so you consider people’s changing relation with context. So you make situational attributions.

Question 42

What is Tao Chi?

Answer 42

Argues that reality is in constant flux -> yin and yang, the moon and the sun, the darkness of the night will yield the brightness of the day, which will lead to the darkness again, and the cycle will continue to repeat. Linked to higher acceptance of negative emotions.

Question 43

How is colour labelled?

Answer 43

Perceptually colour is a continuous variable but linguistically is a categorical variable

Question 44

What is the evidence against the Whorfian hypothesis?

Answer 44

When shown a chip, they were asked to recall which chip was seen. Dani people found it easier to learn and recognize focal learning of the chromatic categories even though there were different colour terms,evidence of learning and memory with similar memory mistakes for English participants. This research argued that colour categories are universal and that perception and memory are independent from language.

Question 45

How does the concept of time differ across cultures?

Answer 45

English: left to right
Arabic: right to left
Australian Aborigines: East to West mapping the movement of the sun
After seeing fish move vertically, Mandarin speakers were faster at responding to whether March was before or after April.
Latin America & Africa: circular time reference, same events are repeated according to cyclical patterns