Contextual and Specific Gazes Are Culturally Influenced

Who knew there were important biases in how we read picture books to a toddler? According to Heise et al., East Asians are more likely than North Americans to attend to visual scenes holistically, focusing on the relations between objects and their background rather than isolating components — and this starts with how we read to our kids and where we point. North Americans point to the crux of the action; East Asians are more likely to point to context. This context-sensitive orientation appears first in social patterns and then may come to apply to more general situations — physics, art appreciation, or medicine. Just as auditory or visual processing can influence our cognitive biases, how we gaze might alter our relationship with the world we occupy.