Lester Loschky

Visual attention is a crucial function that determines what we notice, understand, and remember. Research on the influence of culture on attention has shown that our cultural background unconsciously shapes attentional function. In joint research by the host researcher and the invited researcher, eye movements during video viewing were found to differ significantly between Japanese and American university students: specifically, Japanese participants spent more time looking at background elements than Americans did. This result is consistent with prior research using static images, but is the first to show that the same pattern holds for video. This research project extends these findings from the perspectives of useful field of view (UFOV) and event segmentation, with the aim of clarifying the cognitive mechanisms underlying cross-cultural variation. The background of UFOV research and event-segmentation research, and their relevance to this project, are summarized briefly below. Useful field of view: Intuitively, gaze measurement is often assumed to capture an observer's attention; in reality, however, as illustrated by a no-look pass in basketball, people can attend to regions outside their point of fixation. The extent of peripheral vision to which attention can be directed is called the useful field of view (UFOV), and it is known to be strongly related to behavioral characteristics — for example, drivers with a narrower UFOV are more prone to accidents. The invited researcher has developed a method for measuring UFOV during video viewing, a context involving complex eye movements. Using gaze-contingent UFOV measurement — a task in which a brief grating stimulus is presented in the periphery during eye-tracking and the participant reports its orientation — it has become possible to stably measure UFOV and its changes over time. Gaze-contingent UFOV measurement makes it possible to address an important theoretical question concerning the cause of cultural differences in eye movements during video viewing. The dominant theory in cultural psychology, which holds that East Asians have a holistic and Westerners an analytic cognitive style, predicts a wider UFOV for Japanese individuals. By contrast, the cross-cultural variation in visual search discovered by the host researcher can be quantitatively explained by assuming the opposite — that Japanese individuals have a narrower UFOV. This result can be explained as an effect of reading behavior, given that Japanese readers use kanji while American readers use the alphabet. Both hypotheses are consistent with existing findings on cross-cultural variation in attention, but conventional behavioral experiments have made it difficult to test their validity. Gaze-contingent UFOV measurement makes it possible to test the validity of these hypotheses directly using empirical data. Event segmentation: The everyday events depicted in video have a hierarchical structure, and it is known that people hierarchically segment events while watching video. It is also known that memory for events is better at event boundaries than in the middle of an event, and this may be related to the dynamic allocation of visual attention over time. Gaze-contingent UFOV measurement makes it possible to observe this dynamic process of attentional control. The phenomenon of improved memory performance at event boundaries is consistent with two possibilities: that UFOV narrows at boundaries to extract fine detail, or conversely that it widens to extract information more broadly. Measuring UFOV and combining this with analysis of memory content makes it possible to test the validity of these two hypotheses. The only prior study to examine the relationship between event segmentation and UFOV did not yield clear evidence, and clarification is still needed. Moreover, recent reports suggest that event segmentation itself shows cross-cultural variation. It is important to examine not only the universality but also the cross-cultural variation of the relationship between event segmentation and the temporal dynamics of UFOV, and this study will address this empirically as well. Based on this academic background, this research project poses the following questions: ① Cultural differences in useful field of view: Does UFOV during video viewing differ between Japanese and American viewers, and if so, is it wider or narrower for Japanese viewers? This will clarify the cause of cultural differences in eye movements. ② Event segmentation and the dynamic adjustment of UFOV: Prior research has not yielded sufficient evidence on the relationship between event segmentation and dynamic adjustment of UFOV. We will clarify this relationship through an adequately powered experiment that expands the number of events, video stimuli, and participants. This will clarify the role of dynamic control of visual attention in event comprehension. ③ Cultural differences in attentional control during event segmentation: We will examine, through the cultural comparison between Japanese and American participants, the extent to which dynamic attentional control during event comprehension is universal. This will clarify whether cultural differences in UFOV during video viewing occur uniformly across the entire process of event comprehension, or selectively in particular aspects of it.