Abstract

Evidence exists that individualists (Westerners) tend to focus their attention on the figure of a visual array at the expense of its background (context-independent perception), whereas collectivists (East Asians) process both the figure and its background (context-dependent perception). The purpose of the present study was to test the prediction that cultural orientation shapes perception of bicultural individuals of Middle Eastern descent, a group that has been largely ignored in the extant literature. Participants guessed the number of black dots in a briefly presented array of randomly distributed dots. A rectangle in the center of the array served as the figure and, thus, separated the dots located in the figure from those located in the background. Prior to the dot-counting task, participants saw cultural icons that primed Western or Middle East culture or were assigned to an unprimed (control) condition. Without priming, participants exhibited fewer estimation errors of dots in the figure than in the background. Priming of Western culture did not change this bias. However, priming of Middle Eastern culture equated estimation errors of dots between the figure and its background. Across conditions, the selected group exhibited a mixed cultural orientation, endorsing both collectivism (vertical and horizontal) and horizontal individualism, but not vertical individualism. These findings underlie the responsiveness of the bilingual mind to transitory environmental influences as well as the stability of cultural dispositions.