The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

The Gestalt theorists of the early twentieth century proposed a psychological primacy for circles, squares and triangles over other shapes. They described them as 'good' shapes and the Gestalt premise has been widely accepted. Rosch, for example, suggested that shape categories formed around these 'natural' prototypes irrespective of the paucity of shape terms in a language. Rosch found that speakers of a language lacking terms for any geometric shape nevertheless learnt paired-associates to these 'good' shapes more easily than to asymmetric (...) variants. We question these empirical data in the light of the accumulation of recent evidence in other perceptual domains that language affects categorization. A cross-cultural investigation sought to replicate Rosch's findings with the Himba of Northern Namibia who also have no terms in their language for the supposedly basic shapes of circle, square and triangle. A replication of Rosch found no advantage for these 'good' shapes in the organization of categories. It was concluded that there is no necessary salience for circles, squares and triangles. Indeed, we argue for the opposite because these shapes are rare in nature. The general absence of straight lines and symmetry in the perceptual environment should rather make circles, squares and triangles unusual and, therefore, less likely to be used as prototypes in categorization tasks. We place shape as one of the types of perceptual input that is readily susceptible to effects of language variation. (shrink)

Perceptual similarity was examined in a remote culture and compared to that of Western observers. Similarity was assessed in a relative size judgement task and in an odd-one-out detection task. Thus, we examined the effects of culture on what might be considered low-level visual abilities. For both tasks, we found that performance was affected by stimuli that were culturally relevant to the tasks. In Experiment 1, we showed that the use of cow stimuli instead of the standard circles increased illusory (...) strength for the Himba. In Experiment 2, only the Himba showed more accurate detection based on category differences in the displays. It is argued that that Categorical Perception in Experiment 2, based on its presumed Whorfian origins, was the more reliable procedure for examining the effects of culture on perception. (shrink)