An Overview of Cross-Cultural Research into Visual Perception

It has been asked: “Can the same stimulus appear differently to different people simply because they are members of different cultures? If culture does in fact influence perception, can unequivocal evidence for such a phenomenon be assembled?” (Segall et al., 1966, p. 3). The word “culture” can have different meanings: here, belonging to a particular culture means not only participating in a particular society’s economic and other activities, in its social institutions, and having mastery of its sign systems, but also living in the corresponding natural environment, experiencing the particular diseases common in that society, and so forth. In short, it means any factors influencing, or capable of influencing, apperception or “long-term attitudes” — the activity of the perceiver. Beside the works of A.N. Leontiev on how a native language’s meaning-distinguishing sound parameters (the timbral or tonal language) influences the threshold of pitch distinction