Chapter 9 Cognition and Perception Art galleries in Europe and East Asia. Masuda notice that difference in painting. 1. One thing he noticed is that the horizons in landscape were painted at much higher level, about 15% higher on average, in East Asian pictures than in Western one. 2. He also noticed that subjects in portraits were up to 3x larger in Western pictures than in East Asian ones. 3. Because these people from different cultures seeing the world differently, their fundamental difference in basic cognitive and perceptual processes between 2 cultures. 4. Cognition and perception is see as the top spot. It explained the most elementary and essential psychological process. a) Isolate the building block of psychological experience: The image the eyes perceive, the brain's mechanisms for encoding and retrieving memories, how people categorize information, and the means of understanding the objects and events in daily life. 5. This chapter explores ways in which cognitive and perceptual processes vary across cultures. 6. Exploration is guided by 2 theme of this book. a) Certain cognitive tools are universally available, but they are not always used with the same frequency or for the same purpose. b) The cultural differences that do occur in cognitive and perceptual processes arise because of the diverse experiences people have growing up in their respective cultures. Analytic and Holistic Thinking What are the reason for the variation? 1. How would u have categorized dog, carrot and a rabbit? a) Cluster by dog and rabbit i. Taxonomic categorization, clustering item according to their perceived similarities. Westerner usually give this type. ii. b) Cluster by rabbit and carrot. i. Thematic categorization, the grouping items based on their causal, temporal or spatial association. ii. Common in East Asians. 2. Analytic thinking a) Characterized by a focus on object and their attributes. b) Objects are perceived as existing independently from their context. c) The features that make up object are used as a basis for categorizing the. d) More common in Western cultures. 3. Holistic thinking a) Focus on the context as a whole. b) It is an associative way of thinking or paying attention to the relationship among objects, as well as between the objects and their surroundings. c) Understood in terms of how they relate to the rest of the context. d) Holistic thinking emphasizes knowledge gain through experience rather than the application
of fixed abstract concepts. 4. They may be developed from the diff social experiences people have within individualistic and collectivistic society. a) As people from either collectivistic or individualistic societies, they have diff view of self. i. From Chap 6, people an independent self-concept come to understand others by focusing on their inner attributes and attending less to relationship. ii. Nisbett and his colleagues argues that these cultural difference in ways of understand people also shape thought processes about their physical environment. 5. Distinction between analytic and holistic thinking in Greeks and Chinese 2500 years ago. a) Analytic thinking is evident in Plato's perspective that