Abstract
Group differences in global and local processing between Japanese and Caucasian Canadians were examined using the Navon global-local paradigm (Navon, 1977), a target-search task involving hierarchical figures (e.g., a large “E” made up of small “T”s). To control for dispositional biases, participants were instructed to attend to only the global in one condition, and only the local level in another. Results showed that Canadians were significantly slower to respond to the global level for hierarchical letters (Exp. 1) and the local level for hierarchical shapes (Exp. 2) than Japanese participants, who did not differ in performance regardless of the attended level or type of stimulus (letter or shape). One possibility is that Japanese participants are more adept at controlling how they direct their attention regardless of the kind of information at each level, whereas Canadians are more influenced by bottom-up characteristics at the global and local level.
