Case Study: Influence of Culture on How Paintings are Viewed
The perception of art is a complex interplay of visual stimuli and cognitive processes. While much research has focused on art experts, the study, “The influence of culture on the viewing of Western and East Asian paintings,” by Trawiński et al. (2024) investigated how cultural background shapes the way people visually engage with paintings from different artistic traditions. Building on prior work showing that individuals from collectivist (East Asian) and individualist (Western) cultures perceive scenes differently, the researchers asked whether similar cultural influences appear when viewing representational art. Specifically, they examined whether British and Chinese viewers attend differently to the themes 和 contexts within Western and East Asian paintings, and whether these differences are mediated by the “Other-Race Effect” (ORE)—a well-known phenomenon in face perception whereby individuals process faces from their own culture more efficiently than those from another.
Eye Tracker Records Visual Engagement
The study included Chinese and British university students—who were largely naïve to art. Each group viewed either 100 Western or 100 East Asian paintings, all depicting human figures drawn from traditional motifs such as Judith and Holofernes or Noble Women of the Palace. Participants first completed a memorization (encoding) task, then a recognition (discrimination) task distinguishing previously seen (“target”) paintings from new (“foil”) ones.
Crucially, the researchers employed EyeLink 1000 eye-tracking technology to record participants’ gaze behavior at 1,000 Hz, allowing precise measurement of fixation counts, durations, and gaze patterns across predefined regions of interest (ROIs): faces, themes, and context. By mapping these fixations, the study revealed how cultural background interacts with visual attention during art perception.
Faces are Primary Attentional Anchors
Overall task accuracy confirmed that participants attended closely to the paintings. However, the most revealing insights came from the eye-movement data. Contrary to predictions from general scene-perception research, Chinese participants did not consistently focus more on contextual regions than British participants. Instead, culture primarily affected viewing of faces.
When participant culture and painting tradition matched (e.g., Chinese participants viewing East Asian paintings, or British participants viewing Western paintings), viewers fixated on faces more frequently and for longer durations, with fewer fixations on background or secondary thematic elements. When culture and painting tradition mismatched, gaze to faces decreased while attention shifted slightly to other areas. This pattern suggests that cultural familiarity enhances facial processing within paintings, consistent with the Other-Race Effect observed in face recognition research. Importantly, the study found no broader cultural influence on how participants scanned thematic or contextual regions—indicating that culture’s impact may be specific to face perception rather than general attentional style.
Eye-tracking was essential to uncovering these subtle cultural differences. Traditional behavioral measures such as recognition accuracy alone could not reveal where participants were directing their attention. The EyeLink system enabled millisecond-level tracking of gaze position, allowing the researchers to distinguish viewing of faces, compositional themes, and contextual space. By quantifying fixation patterns across hundreds of paintings, the technology provided objective evidence that cultural matching between viewer and artwork modulates visual engagement with faces, rather than altering global scanning behavior.
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