Do Cross-Cultural Differences in Visual Attention Patterns Affect Search Efficiency on Websites?

Prior work in cross-cultural psychology and neuroscience has shown robust variations in visual attention patterns. People from East Asian societies, in which a holistic thinking style predominates, have been found to attend to contextual information in scenes more than Westerners, whose tendency to think analytically expresses itself in greater attention to foreground objects. This paper applies these findings to website design, using an online study to evaluate whether Japanese (N=65) remember more and are faster at finding contextual website information than US Americans (N=84). Our results do not support this hypothesis. Instead, Japanese overall took significantly longer to find information than US participants—a difference that was exacerbated by an increase in website complexity—suggesting that Japanese may holistically take in a website before engaging with detailed information. We discuss implications of these findings for website design and cross-cultural research.