Visual attention across cultures: Similarities and differences in child development and maternal attention styles

Previous cross-cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context-sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the field is that attention styles are gradually socialized in culture-specific interactions in childhood, empirical evidence for the proximal mechanisms underlying this development is scarce. This study aimed to document the emergence of cross-cultural differences in attention styles in three cultural contexts differing in social orientations, namely in urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany (i.e., more independent context), and Kyoto, Japan, and Indigenous-heritage families from Cotacachi, Ecuador (i.e., more interdependent contexts). Furthermore, to test the assumption that caregivers' attention guidance is one of the forces driving differential development, we investigated how caregivers guide children's attention. In total, 270 children between 4 and 9 years of age and their mothers participated in three tasks: an eye-tracking task, a picture description task and a forced-choice recognition task. Results indicate a mixed pattern of findings: While some tasks revealed the expected cultural differences, namely a higher object focus in Münster compared to Kyoto and Cotacachi, others did not. Regarding caregivers' attention guidance, we found that mothers in Münster more strongly emphasized the focal object than mothers in Kyoto and Cotacachi. The results are discussed in terms of culture-specific developmental trajectories and the generalizability of attentional processes across tasks and cultural contexts. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We investigated visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children and their mothers from urban Germany, urban Japan, and rural Ecuador in three different tasks. Special emphasis lied on mothers' verbal attention guidance toward their children as a proximal mechanism underlying the emergence of culture-specific attention styles. Mothers from urban Germany guided their children's attention in more analytic ways than mothers from urban Japan and rural Ecuador. The relevance of verbal attention guidance in the development of culture-specific attention styles has been demonstrated beyond the East-West dichotomy.

Cultural Similarities and Differences in Explaining Others’ Behavior in 4- to 9-Year-Old Children From Three Cultural Contexts

Previous studies suggest that people from the Western hemisphere tend to explain others’ behavior based on a person’s traits and dispositions, while participants from non-Western cultural settings more likely refer to situational factors. From a developmental perspective, it has been suggested that culture-specific modes of explaining behavior gradually emerge during late childhood and adolescence. The present study explored whether traces of a corresponding culture-specific development can be found at earlier ages when using simplified assessments. In total, 438 children between 4 and 9 years old from Münster (urban Germany), Kyoto (urban Japan), and Cotacachi (rural Ecuador), were asked to explain positive and deviant behaviors of children depicted in simple picture-based vignettes. While more internal attributions were given in Münster than in Kyoto and Cotacachi children at 4 to 5 years old, these cultural differences disappeared as internal attributions significantly increased with age in Kyoto and Cotacachi but not Münster children. Analyzing children’s explanations on a level of subcategories revealed more subtle cultural specificities. For example, when giving internal explanations, Cotacachi children focused on stable traits, while Münster children emphasized individual desires and Kyoto children highlighted more volatile aspects. Cross-cultural differences in children’s social explanations could partially be explained by mothers’ preference for autonomy-related socialization goals. Taken together, this study provides evidence for an earlier onset of internal explanations when they are culturally accentuated and further calls for a more nuanced approach to capture culture-specific meaning systems reflected in everyday social explanations.

Maternal Ethnotheories About Infants’ Ideal States in Two Cultures

Accumulating evidence suggests that ethnotheories about ideal states of infant affect and activity vary across cultures in important ways. However, most previous studies have not directly identified such ethnotheories but rather inferred them from observational studies on mother-infant interaction. To fill this research gap, we interviewed mothers from two cultural milieus—mothers from Münster (urban Germany) and mothers who identify themselves as Kichwas (rural Ecuador), as these contexts presumably offer different construals of the self—to determine their ideal states of infant affect and activity and their self-reported co-regulation tendencies. The interview was based on short video clips of a German and an Ecuadorian infant displaying different combinations of affect (neutral, low-arousal positive or high-arousal positive affect) and activity (low or high). As expected, mothers in Münster preferred higher levels of positive affect than Kichwa mothers. Regarding co-regulation tendencies, we found cultural similarities and differences: Across samples, mothers tended to stimulate affect, and activity, especially when infants were neutral or inactive, but differed in their modality of co-regulation. More specifically, Münster mothers advocated more distal co-regulation modalities than did the Kichwa mothers. Taken together, the present study is the first to provide explicit evidence that maternal ethnotheories about infants’ ideal affect vary across cultures. The cross-cultural differences in ideal affect were not accompanied by differences in self-reported co-regulation of affect, suggesting an indirect link between ideals and (self-reported) parenting behavior.