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FSchooling in western culture promotescontext-free processing

Paulo Ventura a,*, Chotiga Pattamadilok b,c, Tania Fernandes a,Olivier Klein c, Jose Morais c, Regine Kolinsky b,c

a Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciencias da Educac�ao, Universidade de Lisboa, 1649-013 Lisbon, Portugalb Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), B-1000 Brussels, Belgium

c Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), B-1050 Brussels, Belgium

Received 16 July 2007; revised 4 February 2008

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Abstract

Culture has been shown to influence the way people apprehend their physical environment. Cog-nitive orientation is more holistic in East Asian cultures, which emphasize relationships and connect-edness among objects in the field, than in Western cultures, which are more prone to focusexclusively on the object and its attributes. We investigated whether, beyond, or in conjunction withculture, literacy and/or schooling may also have an influence on this cognitive orientation. Using theFramed-Line Test both in Portugal and in Thailand, we compared literate schooled adults with twogroups of unschooled adults: one of illiterates and one of ex-illiterates. As in former studies on Wes-tern people, Portuguese-schooled literates were more accurate in the absolute task than in the rela-tive task. In contrast, Portuguese illiterates and ex-illiterates were more accurate in the relative taskthan in the absolute task. Such an effect of schooling was not observed in the Thai groups, all ofwhom performed better on the relative task. Thus, the capacity to abstract from contextual informa-tion does not stem only from passive exposure to the culture or the physical environment of Westerncountries. Western schooling, as part of or in addition to culture, is a crucial factor.� 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Cognitive orientation; Holistic cognitive orientation; Analytic cognitive orientation; Literacy; Scho-oling

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0022-0965/$ - see front matter � 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2008.02.001

* Corresponding author. Fax: +351 217933408.E-mail addresses: paulo.ventura@fpce.ul.pt, paulo.ventura@gmail.com (P. Ventura).

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Introduction

Recent studies have demonstrated that Western and Eastern cultures influence cogni-tive processing differently. Ji, Nisbett, and Peng (2000) presented European Americanand East Asian undergraduates with the Rod-and-Frame Test (Witkin et al., 1954). In thistask, a frame approximately 16 inches square is rotated independently of a rod that sitsinside it. Both the rod (the black line at the end of the box) and the frame (the box)can be turned independently. The task is to judge when the rod appears to be vertical,or ‘‘straight up and down,” regardless of the frame’s position. Asians made more errors(arc degrees of the deviation of the final rod position from the vertical position) thandid Americans, indicating that Asians are more ‘‘field dependent” and thus had more dif-ficulty in ignoring the frame. Extending this line of work, Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura,and Larsen (2003) developed the Framed-Line Test. East Asian and American undergrad-uates were presented with a square frame in which a line was drawn. They were thenshown other square frames of various sizes and asked to draw a line that was identicalto the first line in either absolute length (absolute task) or ratio to the surrounding frame(relative task). Kitayama and colleagues found that the Americans were more accurate inthe absolute task, whereas the Asians were more accurate in the relative task. Hence, theyconcluded that Asians tend to pay more attention to the field (the frame) than doAmericans.

These differential processing patterns were interpreted as reflecting cultural differences.According to Ji et al. (2000), people in East Asian cultures have a relatively holistic cog-nitive orientation, emphasizing relationships and connectedness among objects in the field,whereas people in the Western world tend to be more analytic in that they are more proneto focus exclusively on the object and its attributes. Nisbett and Masuda (2003) explainedthese differences by their distinct ideological traditions (i.e., Confucianism vs. Aristotelian-ism), which place very different emphases on part versus whole in the appraisal of thephysical world. Miyamoto, Nisbett, and Masuda (2006) also investigated the intriguingpossibility that this cultural difference might be at least partially afforded by differencesin the physical environment. Using both objective and subjective measures, they foundthat Japanese perceptual environments (e.g., urban landscapes) are more complex andambiguous than American ones, suggesting that objects look more embedded in the fieldin the Japanese perceptual environment.

Pedagogical practices might also be at the origin of cultural differences in cognitive ori-entation (e.g., Norenzayan, Nisbett, Smith, & Kim, 2002). That the outgrowth of postper-ceptual analytic abilities depends on schooling has already been demonstrated. We foundthat when unschooled people, either illiterates or ex-illiterates (people of the same socio-cultural origin as illiterates but who learned to read and write at adult age in special alpha-betization classes), were tested on a part-in-a-figure detection task that requiresabstraction from contextual information, they were unable to find the part when thiswas either embedded or fragmented in the figure, whereas second graders performed nearceiling (Kolinsky, Morais, & Brito-Mendes, 1990; Kolinsky, Morais, Content, & Cary,1987).

One of the earliest school activities is learning to read and write. Literacy, rather thanschooling, was shown to be responsible for a turn in a visual task designed by Cooper(1976), Cooper (1980). Cooper attempted to distinguish between holistic and analytic pro-

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cessing using a same–different classification task on visual patterns. Asking participants toclassify pairs of closed and irregular black-colored forms as same or different, she foundthat some university students used holistic processing (same responses were faster than dif-

ferent responses, and the degree of dissimilarity did not affect the latter responses),whereas others used analytic processing (same responses were not faster than differentresponses, and for the latter reaction times increased as similarity increased). Examiningilliterate, ex-illiterate, and literate people in this task, Brito-Mendes, Morais, and Kolinsky(2005) found that illiterates displayed clear signs of holistic processing, whereas both ex-illiterates and literates showed analytic processing. Because ex-illiterates never attendedregular school (they only attended alphabetization classes), the analytic style of processingthey demonstrated cannot stem from schooling; it must, in principle, be attributed to lit-eracy learning.

In the current study, we looked for the potential effect of either literacy or schooling onperformance in the Framed-Line Test. Six groups of participants from two different phys-ical and cultural milieus (Portugal and Thailand) were tested: two unschooled groups (oneconsisting of illiterate people and the other consisting of ex-illiterates) and one group ofschooled (literate) people in each country. If only passive exposure to culture or physicalenvironment mattered, the three Portuguese groups should display, like the Americans,better performance in the absolute task than in the relative task, whereas the three Thaigroups should display, like the East Asians, better performance in the relative task thanin the absolute task. If schooling had an influence on the development of a context-inde-pendent visual processing style, only schooled literates should display better performancein the absolute task; alternatively, if the crucial factor was literacy, only the illiterate peo-ple would be better in the relative task, demonstrating to be context dependent. In addi-tion, the effects of schooling and/or literacy might be differentially modulated by cultureand environment.

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Participants

Three groups were tested in Portugal and in Thailand: one of illiterate adults, one of ex-illiterate adults, and one of literate adults. All participants were paid for their participa-tion. Each group in Portugal was composed of 15 Portuguese native speakers. They werematched on age, which ranged from 18 to 71 years (mean = 55), and gender (6 men and 9women in each group). In Thailand, 32 illiterates (28 women, mean age = 52 years), 18 ex-illiterates (11 women, mean age = 42 years), and 25 literates (16 women, mean age = 43years) were tested.

The literates in both countries had 9 years of schooling on average (SD = 2.0 in Portu-gal, SD = 1.9 in Thailand). The Portuguese illiterates either were recruited through non-governmental agencies or attended alphabetization classes in Lisbon. They were testedduring the first 2 weeks of alphabetization classes, when they had received only informa-tion about civil rights and possible courses. The Portuguese ex-illiterates were engaged inthe fourth (final) level of alphabetization training for adults in Lisbon. The Thai illiteratesand ex-illiterates were recruited through the Non-Formal Education Commission ofThailand. Ex-illiterates either were attending alphabetization classes in their hometown

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(in the south of Thailand) or learned to read by themselves in an informal setting withfriends or family.

All illiterates and ex-illiterates were presented with a letter recognition and reading test(words and pseudowords). On average, Portuguese illiterates were able to identify only 4letters (minimum = 0, maximum = 12) of the 23 letters of the Portuguese alphabet. Noneof them was able to read a single word of the reading test. All ex-illiterates correctly iden-tified the 23 letters and attained at least 85% correct in the reading tests. On average, Thaiilliterates were able to identify only 8 letters (minimum = 0, maximum = 30) of the 44 let-ters of the Thai alphabet. Eight of them were able to ‘‘read” one or two most frequentwords of the reading test. However, this might have reflected their ability to recognizesome very frequent words rather than their decoding ability given that none was able toread a single pseudoword. On average, Thai ex-illiterates were able to identify 42 of the44 letters (minimum = 40, maximum = 44). Most of the letters that were not identifiedcorrectly were rare ones. They reached at least 90% correct in the reading test.

All Portuguese participants were actively working at the time of testing. As mentionedabove, literates had 9 years (SD = 2) of schooling on average, but socioeconomic statuses(as evaluated through their wages) were similar for illiterates and ex-illiterates.

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In both tasks, participants were first shown, on each trial, a square frame, within whicha vertical line was printed. The line was extended downward from the center of the upperedge of the square. Then participants were moved to a different table placed in the oppo-site corner of the room (to ensure that iconic memory played no role) and were shown asecond square frame that was either larger than, smaller than, or the same size as the firstframe. The task was to draw a line in the second frame. In the absolute task, participantswere instructed to draw a line that was of the same absolute length as the line in the firstframe. In the relative task, they were instructed to draw a line whose proportion to the sizeof the second frame was the same as the proportion of the first line to the size of the firstframe. They were presented with the two tasks in a counterbalanced order and receivedspecific instructions for each task right before performing it. Care was taken to ensure thatparticipants understood the tasks by using two concrete examples for each task. In oneexample the first frame was smaller than the second frame, and in the other examplethe first frame was larger than the second frame. Participants were asked to draw a linein the second frame, and feedback on the correctness of the responses was provided.

We used the same experimental material and procedure as Kitayama et al., 2003 (Study2) with one exception (see below). The stimuli were prepared so that there were five differ-

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Height of first frame Length of line Height of second frame

81 68 162108 22 162141 102 141108 73 81162 30 81

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ent combinations of the relative sizes of the two frames and the line in the first frame(Table 1). In two combinations the first frame was smaller than the second frame, andin two other combinations the first frame was larger than the second frame. Furthermore,in half of these cases the first line was longer than half the height of the first square, and inthe remaining half of the cases the first line was shorter than half the height of the firstsquare. Finally, in the fifth combination (there was a similar sixth combination in Kita-maya et al.’s study), the first and second frames were identical in size. The five combina-tions were presented in a random order. The same stimuli were used in the relative andabsolute tasks.

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An inspection of the data showed that overestimation and underestimation occurred toa nearly equal extent for each of the five combinations. Accordingly, to assess performancein the two tasks, we measured the lines drawn by the participants and calculated the abso-lute difference in millimeters between these lengths and the correct lengths.

The mean error scores for the two tasks are summarized in Fig. 1 separately for eachcountry. Task order did not affect performance. The mean error scores were submittedto an analysis of variance (ANOVA) with two between-participants variables (Country:Portugal or Thailand; and Group: illiterates, ex-illiterates, or literates), and one within-participants variable (Task: absolute or relative). Because Thai illiterates were somewhatolder than the other two Thai groups, we also ran an analysis with age as a covariate thatshowed the effects reported below to be unaffected by this variable.

The main effect of country was significant, F(1, 114) = 7.82, p < .01, g2 = .06, withworse performance by the Portuguese participants (15.13) than by the Thai participants(12.38). The main effect of group, F(2, 114) = 2.77, p = .07, g2 = .04, was not significant.Task was significant, F(1, 114) = 13.91, p < .0005, g2 = .11, with worse performance in theabsolute task (15.58) than in the relative task (11.93). Country did not interact with eithergroup, F(2, 114) = 2.18, p > .10, g2 = .04, or task, F < 1.

The interaction involving group and task was significant, F(2, 114) = 13.32, p < .0001,g2 = .19. Most important, this interaction was qualified by an interaction with country,F(2, 114) = 10.93, p < .0001, g2 = .16. Decomposing this three-way interaction, we foundthat the interaction involving group and task was not significant for the Thai participants,F < 1, but was highly significant for the Portuguese participants, F(2, 42) = 35.12,

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p < .0001, g2 = .63. For the Portuguese participants, there was a group effect for both theabsolute task, F(2, 42) = 33.96, p < .0001, g2 = .62, and the relative task, F(2, 42) = 3.77,p < .05, g2 = .15. Although reflecting opposite effects, Tukey HSD tests showed that inboth cases the difference was due to schooling. In addition, Portuguese literates performedbetter in the absolute task than in the relative task, t(14) = 4.67, p < .0005, d = 1.434,whereas both illiterates and ex-illiterates showed the reverse pattern, t(14) = 5.14,d = 1.530, and t(14) = 5.50, d = 1.312, respectively, p < .0001 in both cases. Thai partici-pants showed better performance in the relative task (10.00) than in the absolute task(14.66), F(1, 72) = 11.02, p < .001, g2 = .13.

Between-countries comparisons also showed that, in comparison with Thai literates,Portuguese literates performed better in the absolute task, t(38) = 2.56, p < .01,d = 1.116, but worse in the relative task, t(38) = 3.50, p < .001, d = .864. No differenceas a function of country was observed for illiterates, either in the absolute task,t(45) = 0.92, p > .10, d = .284, or in the relative task, t(45) = 0.29, p > .10, d = .092. Por-tuguese and Thai ex-illiterates performed at the same level in the relative task, t(31) = 0.82,p > .10, d = .281, but Thai participants performed better in the absolute task, t(31) = 3.61,p < .001, d = 1.302.

Thus, the data indicate that in addition to endowing Westerners with analytic abilities,formal schooling somehow deprives them of holistic abilities. This pattern was confirmedby another analysis that took into account a linear transformation of the data, more pre-cisely the proportion of errors in the absolute task relative to the total errors in both tasks(in arcsine transformation). Country was not significant, F � 1, whereas group was signif-icant, F(2, 114) = 12.29, p < .0001, g2 = .17. Most important, the interaction betweencountry and group was highly significant, F(2, 114) = 12.97, p < .0001, g2 = .18. Thaigroups did not differ from each other, F < 1, given that all made the most errors in theabsolute task (62, 56, and 59% of the errors for illiterates, ex-illiterates, and literates,respectively). In contrast, the effect of group was highly significant for Portuguese partic-ipants, F(2, 42) = 40.38, p < .0001, g2 = .65, with literates making a smaller proportion oferrors in the absolute task than in the relative task (31% of the errors) than illiterates (67%)and ex-illiterates (69%), as ascertained by Tukey HSD tests.

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In some visual tasks, Western people (Americans) attend more efficiently to a focalobject independently of its environment (analytic processing) than to the relation of thisobject with its frame (holistic processing), whereas Asian people exhibit the opposite ten-dency. Given that this pattern of results was found with schooled literate people, any inter-pretation based exclusively on either schooling or literacy effects as such can be excluded.Thus, culture was given the entire responsibility for it, remaining to identify the compo-nents of culture that are crucial (see also Nisbett, 2003). The results of our Thai partici-pants replicate previous observations obtained in the Framed-Line Test with Japaneseparticipants (Kitayama et al., 2003) in showing that East Asians are more capable ofincorporating contextual information in making a judgment on a focal object.

However, in this matter as in many others, causality might not be unique. Context-inde-pendent processing could result from a conjunction of factors (all necessary). The currentfinding of a superiority of absolute judgment over relative judgment in Western schooled

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literate people, but of the reverse pattern in Western unschooled individuals (whether lit-erate or not), indicates that becoming context independent does not stem merely from liv-ing in a Western culture. Schooled literate Portuguese behaved like schooled literateAmericans, ruling out the possibility of relevant cultural or physical differences betweenthe Lisbon and Chicago environments. However, both illiterate and ex-illiterate Portu-guese participants showed the reverse pattern, with better performance in the relative taskthan in the absolute task, as did all of the Thai groups. Thus, schooling, as part of or inaddition to Western culture, is a crucial factor. What may matter for the development ofcontextual independence is not merely living in a Western culture but also being formallyeducated according to the criteria of this milieu. Formal schooling during childhood seemsto be determinant for this developmental effect.

More crucially, our data show that in addition to endowing Westerners with contex-tual-independent abilities, traditional schooling somehow deprives them of holistic, con-textual-dependent abilities. Indeed, only the literate schooled Portuguese participants(not the Thai ones) showed more errors in the relative task, both in comparison withthe absolute task and in comparison with all other groups, whether from the same countryor not.

Thus, when both sides of the coin are considered, namely the performance gain in theabsolute task and the performance drop in the relative task, the shift of holistic to analyticprocessing is clearly dependent on Western schooling, not on schooling in general or onliteracy per se.

Thus, this selective shift from holistic to analytic processing probably is very differentfrom the literacy-dependent effect observed in Cooper’s (1976, 1980) task (Brito Mendeset al., 2005). The latter only involves paying attention systematically and sequentially tosmall details. This may be the kind of attention that learning the symbols of a writing sys-tem enables. In all likelihood, Asian children learning to read kana, kanji, or Chinese char-acters develop this kind of analytic ability with the same facility as, and perhaps greaterfacility than, children learning to read an alphabet. On the contrary, performance wasdependent on schooling in both the part detection task (Kolinsky et al., 1987; Kolinskyet al., 1990) and the Framed-Line Test used here. Although we do not know whetherthe effect observed in the part detection task depends on schooling in general or on Wes-tern schooling more specifically as was the case in the current study, it is worth noting thatboth tasks require abstracting from contextual information. This dissociation suggeststhat analytic and context-independent processing are not equivalent concepts and that lit-erate Asian people may be as analytic, in the sense of paying attention to details system-atically and sequentially, as are literate Western people. We would then predict thatliterate Asian people are not faster for same responses than for different responses andwould display a distance effect on the different trials, the pattern of results assumed byCooper (1976), Cooper (1980) to reflect analytic processing. Only the development of acontext-independent bias would be culture and schooling dependent. In sum, makingsequential attention to small details in a systematic way may be the kind of postperceptualanalysis that learning the symbols of a writing system enables. We call this ability, whichseems to be influenced by literacy, sequential local attention, and consider it to differ fromcontextual filtering, which is not linked specifically to literacy but develops with Westernschool instruction.

The inference that our Western pattern of results is influenced by schooling may need tobe tempered somewhat because the influence of other factors somehow correlated with

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schooling ought to be considered. For obvious reasons, the Portuguese participants hadnot been randomly assigned to the different groups. The sociocultural factors that pro-vided opportunities for schooling in the literate group may have been missing for theremaining participants. These factors may, in principle, also be responsible for theobserved Western group differences. For example, Markus and Kitayama (1991) assumedthat the way the self is defined in relation to others (e.g., the self can be seen either asautonomous and unique or as inextricably embedded within a larger social network)not only varies between cultures but also between specific groups within a culture. Forinstance, in Western culture, religious groups such as the Quakers explicitly value and pro-mote interdependence, as do small towns and rural communities. Thus, it is possible thatthe schooled Western participants of our study have a far more independent style of selfthan do those who had no chance of schooling. Indeed, one might imagine that theunschooled people might have been brought up in farming communities that are morehighly interdependent, whereas the schooled people have been brought up in working-classenvironments that might foster self-reliance. However, one should acknowledge that prob-ably the same factors are at play in the East Asian population. Thus, such a view makes itdifficult to explain why the influence of schooling differs as a function of culture.

In any case, the exact nature of the Western schooling activities that allow the develop-ment of a context-independent bias in visual processing is unknown. The influence ofschooling may be mediated, or at least reinforced, by the actual content of what is readand more generally learned at school and later in life. For sure, ex-illiterates are readers,but the content of what they read is likely to differ from that of literates who have beenschooled since an early age. In addition, contrary to the latter, during childhood theydid not benefit from reading texts or from other schooling activities.

Reading often is one of the best ways to engage the beliefs and ideology of a culture. Ifthis tends to emphasize an analytic worldview, as is the case for Western cultures (Fiske,Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Norenzayan & Nisbett,2000), those who have undergone formal schooling during childhood within this culturemay be more prone to process stimuli in a context-independent way. This perspective iscompatible with the assumption that the cognitive processes involved in field dependenceare not ‘‘content free” but rather embedded within cultural beliefs (Fiske et al., 1998). Inline with Fiske and colleagues’ (1998) model, it also suggests that specific activities, such asreading (and going to school), may shape the relation between cultural beliefs and cogni-tion. According to this view, schooling could exacerbate the influence of culture, althoughin other domains it surely increases cultural independence through the explicit instructionand practice of logical reasoning and critical thinking.

Given that unschooled Portuguese people also seem to adopt a holistic style, our resultssuggest that this style does not derive from socialization within an Asian culture. One maytentatively suggest that the ‘‘default” processing style is the holistic one. In line with thisassumption, Nisbett and Miyamoto (2005) mentioned an unpublished finding (by Duffyet al.) according to which, in the Framed-Line Test, 4-year-olds in both the United Statesand Japan performed better on the relative judgment task than on the absolute judgmenttask, whereas 5-year-olds in the United States became more accurate in the absolute taskthan in the relative task. Their results suggest that both Americans and Japanese showholistic processing at 4 years of age. This seems to indicate that the more natural process-ing style is context dependent and that some aspects of Western culture induce, quiteabruptly, a change toward a more context-independent style. This factor could be related

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to school activities in kindergarten that might be more oriented toward independence fromcontext in Western countries than in Asian countries. Consistent with this idea, Chua,Boland, and Nisbett (2005) found cultural differences in eye movements not in initialobservation but rather in subsequent scene observation. European Americans and Chineseparticipants were presented with pictures of a focal object (e.g., a tiger) placed on a back-ground (e.g., the jungle). Compared with Chinese participants, Americans looked at thefocal object sooner and fixated it for a longer time. On the contrary, Chinese participantsmade more saccades, in particular to the background. Most important for the current dis-cussion, until 420 ms after scene onset, both Americans and East Asians fixated the back-ground of the scene—its context—more than they did the focal objects. Culturaldifferences were observed only after this early phase. Thus, given the results obtained bothin the current study and in the studies just mentioned, the most likely hypothesis (needingfurther attempts of disconfirmation) is that the ‘‘natural” processing style is the holisticone. Survival in a hostile environment may be served more efficiently by attending to con-text than by neglecting it. Even though we are discussing data obtained in the context of acultural cognition approach, we ought to admit that human biology may also constrain(or provide the foundation for) cognitive style. Under these assumptions, the context-inde-pendent processing style could be viewed as the creation of particular cultures.

As Kitayama et al. (2003) commented, neither of these cognitive styles should be con-sidered as more valuable than the other. This remains true even if the context-dependentstyle were shown to have some biological foundation. The efficiency of the two styles actu-ally depends on the situation and the goals of the individual. Moreover, in this respect wedisapprove of the widespread use of the terms perception and perceptual processing in thisliterature. The Framed-Line Test is not a test of perception but rather a test of attention(which aspects of the stimulus the viewer chooses to look at or focus on) and of memory(because the participant is required to do the task according to a model that is no longeravailable for inspection).

The current results, of course, need to be generalized using other experimental situa-tions. As a matter of fact, one should acknowledge that although the Framed-Line Testhas been used previously to operationalize holistic versus analytic processing (Kitayamaet al., 2003) and is an extension of the well-known Rod-and-Frame Test developed by Wit-kin et al. (1954), it consists of a limited number of trials compared with other paradigms.Other methodologies, such as ecological eye-tracking situations (Chua et al., 2005), mightprovide helpful and informative data. Future studies will aim at determining whether thecurrent results may be replicated with a computerized version of the Framed-Line Testallowing recording of eye movements.

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C Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestionson a previous version of this manuscript. This research was supported by a grant fromFCT–MCTES (Project PTDC/PSI/66077/2006, ‘‘Cognitive Consequences of Literacy”),by two grants from the Belgian French community (FRFC 2.4586.07 and ARC 06/11-342), and by the Centro de Psicologia Clınica e Experimental–Desenvolvimento, Cognic�aoe Personalidade of the Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. The second and last authors are

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postdoctoral researcher and senior research associate, respectively, of the Belgian Fondsde la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS).

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