Show subjects a picture of an object embedded in a complex background. Within seconds, people from collectivist cultures (e.g., China) tend to look more at, and remember better, the surrounding “contextual” information, while people from individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) do the same with the focal object. Instruct subjects to focus on the domain that their culture doesn’t gravitate toward, and there’s frontal cortical activation—this is a difficult perceptual task. Thus, culture literally shapes how and where you look at the world.*43
