Data_Sheet_1_The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention in Urban and Rural Brazil.xlsx

Human perception differs profoundly between individuals from different cultures. In the present study, we investigated the development of context-sensitive attention (the relative focus on context elements of a visual scene) in a large sample (N = 297) of 5- to 15-year-olds and young adults from rural and urban Brazil, namely from agricultural villages in the Amazon region and the city of São Paulo. We applied several visual tasks which assess context-sensitive attention, including an optical illusion, a picture description, a picture recognition and a facial emotion judgment task. The results revealed that children and adults from the urban sample had a higher level of context-sensitive attention, when compared to children and adults from the rural sample. In particular, participants from São Paulo were more easily deceived by the context elements in an optical illusion task and remembered more context elements in a recognition task than participants from rural Amazon villages. In these two tasks, context-sensitivity increased with age. However, we did not find a cultural difference in the picture description and the facial emotion judgment task. These findings support the idea that visual information processing is highly dependent on the culture-specific learning environments from very early in development. Specifically, they are more consistent with accounts that emphasize the role of the visual environment, than with the social orientation account. However, they also highlight that further research is needed to disentangle the diverse factors that may influence the early development of visual attention, which underlie culture-specific developmental pathways.

不同文化背景的个体间，视觉感知存在显著差异。本研究针对来自巴西城乡（即亚马逊地区农业村落与圣保罗市）的297名5至15岁儿童及青年成年人组成的大样本（N=297），探究了情境敏感注意力（context-sensitive attention，即对视觉场景中背景元素的相对关注度）的发展规律。我们采用了多项评估情境敏感注意力的视觉任务，包括视错觉任务、图片描述任务、图片再认任务以及面部情绪判断任务。研究结果显示，相较于乡村样本中的儿童与成年人，城市样本中的个体情境敏感注意力水平更高。具体而言，与亚马逊乡村村落的参与者相比，圣保罗市的参与者在视错觉任务中更容易被背景元素误导，且在再认任务中能记住更多背景元素；在这两项任务中，情境敏感性随年龄增长而提升。但在图片描述任务与面部情绪判断任务中，我们未发现文化差异。上述研究结果支持这一观点：视觉信息加工在发展早期便高度依赖于文化特异性的学习环境。具体而言，相较于社会取向理论，本研究结果更符合强调视觉环境作用的相关理论解释。不过，本研究也指出，未来仍需开展进一步研究，以厘清可能影响视觉注意力早期发展的各类因素——而这些因素正是文化特异性发展路径的基础。