Culture variation in the average identity extraction: The role of global vs. local processing orientation.

Abstract

Research has shown that observers often spontaneously extract a mean representation from multiple faces/objects in a scene even when this is not required by the task. This phenomenon, now known as ensemble coding, has so far mainly been based on data from Western populations. This study compared East Asian and Western participants in an implicit ensemble-coding task, where the explicit task was to judge whether a test face was present in a briefly exposed set of faces. Although both groups showed a tendency to mistake an average of the presented faces as target, thus confirming the universality of ensemble coding, East Asian participants displayed a higher averaging tendency relative to the Westerners. To further examine how a cultural default can be adapted to global or local processing demand, our second experiment tested the effects of priming global or local processing orientation on ensemble coding via a Navon task procedure. Results revealed a reduced tendency for ensemble coding following the priming of local processing orientation. Together, these results suggest that culture can influence the proneness to ensemble coding, and the default cultural mode is malleable to a temporary processing demand.