While the number of object fixations was similar for both groups, Chinese made more background fixations than Americans.
In addition, in Americans, the average duration of object fixations was longer than for background fixations, and this difference was greater than in Chinese.
Like Chua et al. [10], we showed that there were longer fixation durations for the US compared to the Singapore participants for both object and background fixations.
Additionally, despite the picture manipulations, US participants consistently maintained longer durations for both object and background fixations, with eye-movements that generally remained within the focal objects.
With regards to projecting these cultural differences onto eye-movement variables, previous studies have quantified eye-movements during scene viewing using the number of object and background fixations and mean fixation durations.
When examining eye-movements for a subset of their scene stimuli that consisted of singular central objects, their data more resembled Chua et al.'s [10] findings, with East Asian participants making more background fixations than Western participants.
An analysis of duration of background fixations yielded evidence for a main effect of culture, due to longer fixation durations to backgrounds in the US participants compared to the Singapore participants (F 1, 29) = 7.67, p<.01, η2 = .21; 220.6 ms vs. 151.6 ms).
Interestingly, Chua et al. [10] also observed that overall durations for both object and background fixations were longer for Americans than for Chinese, indicating that Americans' eye-movements were characterized by longer dwell times, perhaps to extract more visual details at each focal point.
Finally, the different measures of eye-movements that characterize the number of fixations to objects and backgrounds, fixation durations, and eye-movements between objects and backgrounds may each reflect different aspects cultural biases on visual attention.
Generally, subjects increased number of backgrounds fixations over time, except when the object changed against a stable background (New/Old vs. the mean of three conditions: Old/Old, Old/New, and New/New; F 1, 30) = 23.50, p<.01, η2 = .44), during which it was probably useful to make more object fixations.
