Abstract
In 1977, Navon argued that perception is biased towards the processing of global as opposed to local visual information (or the forest before the trees) and implicitly assumed this to be true across places and cultures. Previous work with normally developing participants has supported this assumption except in one extremely remote African population. Here, we explore local–global perceptual bias in normally developing African participants living much less remotely than the African population tested previously. These participants had access to modern artefacts and education but presented with a local bias on a similarity-matching Navon task, contrary to Navon’s assumptions. Nevertheless, the urban and more educated amongst these participants showed a weaker local bias than the rural and less educated participants, suggesting an effect of urbanicity and education in driving differences in perceptual bias. Our findings confirm the impact of experience on perceptual bias and suggest that differences in the impact of education and urbanicity on lifestyles around the world can result in profound differences in perceptual style. In addition, they suggest that local bias is more common than previously thought; a global bias might not be universal after all.
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As of 2018, the study was cited more than 3000 times.
According to the African Bank of Development, Rwanda’s real GDP grew by an average of 8% annually during the period 2000 to 2013, which is among the highest average growth rates in Africa (see “Rwanda − 2014 - Country Profile - African Development Bank”; http://www.afdb.org). According to the World Bank, Rwanda might become a middle income country by 2020 (http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/rwanda/overview).
This reanalysis left the data largely unchanged because the 6 stimuli used in this study were purposefully selected to be representative of performance on the full version of the test.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Rwandan National Ethics Committee, the Commission Nationale de Lutte Contre le Génocide, and the Rwandan National Unity and Reconciliation Committee for allowing this research to take place. We thank our research assistants, Emmanuel Habumugisha, André Hakorimama, Marie-Chantal Ingabire, Emmanuel Karamira, Dancille Mukarubibi, and Jean-Baptiste Uwanjye, for their invaluable help. We thank our collaborators Eugène Rutembesa and Emmanuel Habimana for their help in making this project feasible. We thank Karen Brounéus for her advice and the questionnaires that she kindly shared with us. We also thank Bernhard Hommel, Peter A. van der Helm, and an anonymous reviewer for their extremely constructive comments on our manuscript. Most importantly, we are immensely grateful to the individual Rwandans who participated in our study and welcomed us and our project with openness, benevolence and generosity.
Funding
This research was funded by an Insight Development grant awarded to the first and last authors by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a project grant awarded to the middle author and her colleagues by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK.
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Serge Caparos declares that he has no conflict of interest. Karina J Linnell declares that she has no conflict of interest. Isabelle Blanchette declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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Caparos, S., Linnell, K.J. & Blanchette, I. The local perceptual bias of a non-remote and educated population. Psychological Research 84, 1211–1222 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01158-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01158-6