Western societies are individualistic, encouraging the development of individual goals, which would favor the perception of focal object in a context. One of the most prominent, despite debatable, position in the cultural framework posits the roots of the diversity in cultural perceptual strategies in the organization of the social systems in which people develop and live (for a review see, ). The nose region is the most advantageous spatial position to capture facial feature information globally (see Figure 1 - 8° condition), since retinal cell density and visual resolution decrease steeply towards the peripheral visual field.

Our previous eye movement data suggest that Western Caucasian observers deploy an analytical perceptual strategy to integrate facial information by using feature-by-feature fixations, whereas East Asian observers focused on the region that is optimal and economical to integrate information globally: the center of the face (i.e., the nose region). By contrast, Easterners focus more globally on relationships and similarities among objects when organizing the environment. Western cultures focus on salient objects or features and use analytical categorization rules to organize the environment.

All these studies converge into a similar pattern of results, revealing that distinct cultural mechanisms influence visual perception and categorization. A growing body of literature (for a review see ) has reported systematic differences across cultures in a variety of perceptual tasks and paradigms: scene perception (e.g., ) and description (e.g., ), perceptual categorization (e.g., ) and eye movement for scene affordance. We mainly attributed eye movement diversity in face processing to genuine systematic cultural perceptual differences observed between Westerners and Easterners. Instead, the strategies employed to extract visual information from faces varies across cultures. These observations demonstrate that face processing does not arise from a universal series of perceptual events. Such cultural diversity in eye movements was robust over time and generalized across different face processing tasks (learning, recognition and categorization by race). However, contrary to all prior knowledge, Easterners consistently focus more on the nose, yet recognition accuracy was comparable. We showed that Westerners predominantly fixate the eye region to learn and recognize faces, a well established finding in the eye movement literature on faces, ,, ,. We recently questioned the universality of how face recognition is achieved by recording eye movements. This critical biological function is a basic requirement for efficient social interactions, for all humans within all cultures. As noted by Galton over one century ago, the human capacity for face recognition is remarkable compared to the recognition of other objects.

Trick of the Spotlight by M.L. East