In a delightfully revealing experiment from 2010, David J. Kelly and Roberto Caldara discovered that people from Western societies exhibit different eye movements than people from Eastern societies. As they put it, “Culture affects the way people move their eyes to extract information in their visual world.” Asians extracted visual information more “holistically,” whereas westerners did so more “analytically” (there was no difference in their ability to recognize faces). Western cultures focus on discrete elements or “salient objects” with which they can confidently process information, as
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