AsianScientist (Mar. 18, 2016) – Does culture influence how people pay attention to objects and actions around them? Past studies have suggested they do. But how early do culture-specific patterns of attention emerge in development?
A study led by an international team from Northwestern University in the US and the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants’ attention may be subtly shaped by the characteristics of adults in their cultural communities. Their work was published in Frontiers in Psychology.
By using an eye-tracking technique, they examined how 24-month-old infants, focused their attention on objects and actions as they observe scenes. At 24 months, infants are just on the threshold of learning words for objects and actions.
Firstly, during the familiarization phase, all the infants in the study watched a series of scenes, such as a girl petting a dog. Then, in the test phase, the infants watched new scenes in which either object or the action was switched—the girl kissing a pillow versus the girl kissing a dog.
The researchers found that infants from China preferred looking at the scenes featuring a new action, while infants from the US preferred scenes featuring a new object. Decades of previous research suggests that when observing scenes, adults from the US focus predominantly on objects, while those from China and Japan direct more of their attention to the contexts and action events in which those objects are engaged.
The results provide the earliest evidence for strong overlap in the infants’ attention to objects and actions. Because infants pay attention carefully to the actions of their parents and to others close to them, by 24 months, they may have begun to pick up on the ‘attentional strategies’ characteristic of adults in their respective communities.
The article can be found at: Waxman et al. (2016) How Early is Infants’ Attention to Objects and Actions Shaped by Culture? New Evidence from 24-Month-Olds Raised in the US and China.
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Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences; Photo: Shutterstock.
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