A processing advantage associated with analytic perceptual tendencies: European Americans outperform Asians on multiple object tracking

Analytic visual processing and holistic visual processing have been conceptualized in terms of attention to focal objects vs. the background. We expand the study of perceptual biases associated with these attentional patterns using the multiple object tracking task, which measures people's ability to track multiple moving target objects amidst otherwise identical distractors. We test two competing hypotheses: (1) Asians' more frequent eye saccades will enable them to quickly cycle through the multiple target objects before the objects move too far away, giving them another perceptual advantage; and (2) European Americans' tendency to focus attention on the focal objects while inhibiting attention to less important objects might facilitate tracking of multiple moving objects. We find that European Americans significantly outperform Asians on multiple object tracking. The research expands the conceptualization of analytic processing and holistic processing to include selective attention as a key component, a facet that has not been previously identified.

► European Americans perform better than Asians at tracking multiple moving objects. ► European Americans can track 4.3 moving objects, but Asians only 3.4 moving objects. ► New conceptualization of analytic attention as defined by selective attention.