The Cross-Cultural Interplay of Visual Attention and Artistic Design in Comics: Insights From Eye-Tracking Evidence on American and Japanese Readers

This study investigated cross-cultural differences in visual attention patterns during comic reading, focusing on participants with Japanese and American cultural backgrounds. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined attention processes as participants viewed pages from American comics and Japanese manga featuring objective or subjective viewpoints. The results showed that for objective pages, American readers exhibited relatively longer fixations on focal objects, while Japanese readers allocated relatively more attention to backgrounds, aligning with analytic versus holistic cognitive styles. By contrast, for subjective materials, Japanese readers demonstrated greater attention to focal objects than American readers did, suggesting that the subjective perspective embedded in manga shifts Japanese readers toward a focal-object-oriented attentional style. Individual differences in self-reported analytic-holistic cognitive styles and manga reading experience, in addition to cultural background, were associated with attentional patterns for manga. The results underscore the influence of artistic design in shaping visual attention in ways that both mirror and transcend culturally ingrained attentional biases. This study deepens our understanding of cross-cultural variations in visual processing and comic reading behaviors, providing fresh insights into the complex interplay among culture, cognition, and visual narrative comprehension.