A British student and a Chinese student sit in front of the same painting. For the first two seconds, their eyes do much the same thing. Then their gazes diverge—and the difference can be measured with millisecond precision. That’s the conclusion of an eye-tracking study published in 2024, and it should interest anyone who has ever stood in front of a poster and wondered why one particular image feels right while another leaves them unmoved. The gaze is not neutral, after all. It is shaped, slowly and unconsciously, by the visual world we grew up in.
For more than twenty-five years, cognitive researchers have measured how people from different cultures look at pictures. The findings have shifted, been challenged, and refined—and that is precisely why they are more interesting than the simple version usually cited. Here’s what the research actually shows, and what it means when you choose a picture for your own wall.
Quick facts: In the study "The influence of culture on the viewing of Western and East Asian paintings" (Trawiński et al., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2024, vol. 18:2, pp. 121–142), Chinese and British students were asked to view 100 Western or 100 East Asian paintings. Their gaze patterns began to differ about two seconds after the image appeared—before that, they were strikingly similar.
The two seconds when gazes diverge—what Trawiński’s measurements revealed
The study used paintings featuring human figures from both traditions: European subjects such as Judith and Holofernes, and East Asian court scenes with female figures. The participants were university students with no art education, which is important—it means this is not about learned art theory, but something more fundamental.
Two findings stood out. First: when the viewer’s culture matched the painting’s tradition, they spent more time looking at faces, at the expense of everything else in the picture. Chinese participants looked longer at faces in East Asian paintings, British participants at faces in Western paintings. The researchers interpret this as a variation of the so-called other-race effect—we read faces we recognize more quickly and in greater detail.
The second finding had to do with time. In the first few seconds, the Chinese participants paid more attention to the picture’s context—the background, the setting, the relationships between the figures. After about two seconds, their gaze shifted to the picture’s theme rather than the faces, while the British participants did the opposite and stayed focused on the faces.
The difference isn’t in what we say about a picture. It’s in where the eye lands before we’ve had time to think a single thought about it.
The fact that the difference emerges after two seconds, not immediately, is the whole point. The first reflexive fixation is guided by contrast and light. What comes next is interpretation—and that’s where culture starts to work.
The fish tank, 2001: the experiment that made cultural vision a measurable science
The entire field of research traces its origins to a 2001 experiment by Takahiko Masuda and Richard Nisbett. Japanese and American participants watched short animated sequences of an underwater scene: a large, colorful fish swims across the frame, surrounded by seaweed, rocks, shells, and smaller fish. Then they were asked to describe what they had seen.
The Americans almost always started with the big fish. The Japanese, by contrast, usually started with the surroundings—“it looked like a pond”—and made about sixty percent more references to background elements. They also mentioned relationships between objects twice as often: that the little fish was swimming behind the seaweed, that the rock was next to the shell.
Five years later, the findings were extended in a study on change blindness. Japanese participants were more likely to notice when something in the background had changed, while American participants were more likely to notice when something about the main object had changed. The conclusion that emerged in the literature was a dichotomy: holistic vision that reads the scene and its relationships, versus analytical vision that isolates the salient object and its features.
Confirmation came in 2005 from eye-tracking research. American participants directed their gaze toward the main subject earlier and lingered there longer. Chinese participants made more rapid eye movements toward the background. The same image, two different ways of taking it in.
The horizon line that reveals everything—when art history and the lab tell the same story
The most elegant evidence came in 2008, when Masuda, together with Richard Gonzalez, Letty Kwan, and Nisbett, published “Culture and Aesthetic Preference” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Instead of merely measuring eye movements, the researchers analyzed the art itself.
They examined landscape paintings and portraits from both traditions and found a systematic pattern: in East Asian painting, the horizon line sits higher in the picture, leaving more room for the surroundings, while human figures occupy a smaller portion of the image. In Western portraiture, the figure is larger, closer, and more isolated from its context.
Seda asked modern participants to draw a landscape and photograph a model. American participants drew lower horizon lines and photographed the model so that her face filled a larger part of the frame. East Asian participants placed the horizon higher and zoomed out to put the person in context. Aesthetics, then, wasn’t just in the hands of the old masters—it was in the participants’ hands.
This explains a lot about why Japandi posters feel calm in a different way from a classic European portrait. A Japanese woodblock print of a bird on a branch almost always gives the branch, the open air, and the season as much space as the bird. Those of us raised with Western visual traditions look at the bird first - and experience the rest as emptiness, rest, breathing room. We read the image “wrong” compared with how it was created, and that very misreading is part of why it works so well on a Nordic wall.
The 2025 cross-cultural study that overturned the neat hypothesis
The story could end neatly here. It doesn’t.
In August 2025, Jiří Čeněk and colleagues published a study in Scientific Reports (volume 15, article 28574) that is the broadest of its kind to date. Data were collected between 2020 and 2022 from 408 participants across seven cultural samples spanning Africa, East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Each participant freely viewed 70 real photographs with one or two main subjects, while time spent looking at each subject and the length of eye movements were measured.
Earlier research suggested a clear hypothesis: East Asia would be the most holistic, Europe the most analytical, and the rest somewhere in the middle. The results were different. Participants from Taiwan did indeed show the most holistic pattern - but participants from Germany and the Czech Republic did not differ significantly from them. And the samples expected to fall in the middle, Ghana and Turkey, instead showed the most analytical pattern of all.
The conclusion is not that the cultural way of looking is a myth. It’s that it doesn’t follow a simple East-West axis. Education level, urbanization, familiarity with photographic images, and how much screen time a person has behind them seem to matter just as much as geography. That same year, a study in Cognitive Science showed that American and Japanese comic readers distribute their gaze differently across the page - where the conventions of the form itself, not just nationality, shape what the eye looks for.
Tip: Test your own way of looking before you order. Open two artworks you like, look at each for exactly five seconds, then write down what you remember. If you only remember the main subject, you look analytically - in that case, you’ll appreciate an artwork with a clear focal point. If you remember the colors, light, and surrounding atmosphere, you take a more holistic approach - and enjoy context-rich artworks where there’s still something to discover after the third week.
What this means for your wall at home: context-rich or object-focused artwork
Research offers no definitive answer about taste, but it gives us two useful concepts when choosing artwork.
An object-focused image has a clear center where the gaze lands and lingers: a portrait, a single flower, a sharply defined shape. These images work well from a distance and in rooms you pass through rather than linger in—the entryway, stairwell, hallway. They’re read quickly and make an immediate impression. Most of the classic European paintings in our collection of art by well-known artists fit this category.
A context-rich image spreads information across the entire picture: a landscape with a high horizon, a woodblock print where the branch and the space around it carry as much weight as the bird, a misty coastline. These images offer less reward in two seconds but much more over two years. They belong where you spend a long time—by the sofa, in the reading nook, opposite the bed. Our collection of nature prints is full of this kind of image.
A third approach is deliberate reduction. Minimalist posters do something interesting with the trained gaze: by removing both context and detail, they force a pause. There’s nothing to work through. That’s also why they can feel either liberating or frustrating—and why reactions to them vary so much from one viewer to another.
In practice: put object-focused images where people are in a hurry, and context-rich ones where they have time. It’s a simpler rule than it sounds, and it holds regardless of which style you like. If you’d like to learn more about how long we actually look at art, there’s an overview of the research on viewing time, and if the amount of detail in an image is the sticking point, you can read more about visual complexity and why the brain seeks the midpoint.
Frequently asked questions about culture, gaze, and how we see art
Gaze can be understood, and once you know where yours tends to settle, it becomes easier to trust your choice of subject. If you want to start with East Asia, our overview of Japanese woodblock prints by Ohara Koson and Hasui Kawase is a good introduction. If you want to delve into the primary sources, the cross-cultural study is freely available at Scientific Reports, the timeline of viewing figurative paintings at APA PsycNet, and the art-historical analysis at SAGE Journals. And when you’ve found the subject that holds your gaze the longest, you’ve probably found the right one.