When Does the Culturally Dominant Mode of Attention Appear or Disappear? Comparing Patterns of Eye Movement During the Visual Flicker Task Between European Canadians and Japanese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous findings in culture and attention reported mixed results. While some studies demonstrated systematic cultural variations in patterns of eye movement, other studies reported that the magnitude of the effects is minor. To further scrutinize when cultural variations in attention are attenuated or enhanced, we conducted a new series of visual flicker tasks while making changes in focal figures more salient than those in the background. European Canadian and Japanese participants searched for a change in a pair of quickly alternating still images. The task consisted of two parts: In the majority of trials, we set a change in part of either the focal object or the background (change trials), while in some trials, a pair of identical images was presented unbeknownst to participants (no-change trials), which resulted in forcing participants to search for a nonexistent change for 1 min. We then measured patterns of eye movement during each type of trial. The results of the change trials indicated that there were no cultural variations in change detection styles, nor were there cultural variations in eye movement patterns except for the total fixation duration, suggesting in general that both groups exhibited similar bottom-up patterns of attention. However, in the no-change trials, there were substantial cultural variations in eye movement patterns: European Canadians substantially attended to the focal figures longer and more frequently than to the backgrounds, whereas Japanese equally allocated their attention to both the focal figures and the backgrounds, suggesting that culturally unique top-down patterns were more evident.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".