Week 5: Cognition and perception Flashcards
Taxonomic categorization
The grouping of items according to perceived similarities
Thematic categorization
The grouping of items based on their causal, temporal, or spatial relationship
How do categorization strategies differ between Westerners and East Asians?
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.
What are the differences in thinking styles between Westerners and East Asians?
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.
What are the possible causes for the differences in thinking styles?
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)
What is important to remember about self-concepts and their causes?
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.
Which thinking style is the default?
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.
What is the cultural variation in attention?
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
What is the difference in patterns of thinking in the Rorshach test?
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.
What is the rod and frame test?
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.
How did American and Japanese participants perceive the foreground and background of images?
- 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.
How do Japanese and American participants perceive the emotions of central figures?
- 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
What are saccades?
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.
How do artistic preferences differ between cultures?
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
What are the different types of attributions?
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
How did Indians and Americans explain when someone behaved in an expected or deviant manner?
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.
Rule-based learning
making decisions based on fixed, abstract rules and laws, related to analytical thinking
Associative reasoning
making decisions based on the relationships between objects and events, related to holistic thinking
What has research found about different types of reasoning?
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
How is the approach to tolerate contradiction different for analytic thinkers compared to holistic thinkers?
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).
How did research investigate contradiction?
- 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
How are Chinese and American students in making future predictions?
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
How did performance change for Europeans and Asians in an IQ test?
- 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)
How could these results be explained?
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.