2007 Volume 23 Issue 2 Pages 181-186
In the present work, we sought to determine whether the tendency to attend holistically to both a focal object and its context, identified among college students in Japan, would extend to non-student adults. We administered two diagnostic tasks of holistic attention to 59 Japanese adults of a wide age range (from 22 to 78). One task assessed the degree to which individuals can ignore emotional vocal context when judging the focal verbal meaning of a spoken word. The other task measured both the degree to which individuals can ignore a square frame (context.) when making a judgment of the absolute length of a focal line embedded in the frame and the degree to which they can incorporate the contextual frame information when making a judgment of the proportional length of the focal line vis-a-vis the frame. In both cases, Japanese adults were quite sensitive to the contextual stimuli and, thus, to failing to ignore the vocal context and the contextual frame. Importantly, these effects were observed regardless of age.
