America vs. Japan: Brains and Comic/Manga Panels

Via the TCJ message board, Nathan has pointed to an article in the Boston Globe that discusses the differences in brain activation between "Eastern and Western" perceptual processing. The study claims that "Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings" while Easterners "tend to focus more on the context as well as the object." From the article:

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To use a camera analogy, "the Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic," said Dr. Denise Park of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas. "The Easterner probably sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail."

"Literally, our data suggest that people see different elements of pictures," Park said. "If you're looking at an elephant in the jungle, the Westerner will focus on the elephant and the Easterner is going to be more thinking about the jungle scene that has the elephant in it."

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In a way, these findings are supportive of McCloud's claims that manga use more "wandering eye" type of panel "transitions."

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My study found that American comics by far used more comic panels that featured a whole scene ("Macros"), while Japanese manga used equal amounts of panels with whole scenes and individual characters ("Monos"). Manga also used a great deal more "Micro" panels, which feature a "zoom."**

These results would seem to support a view that Japanese panels allow a focus on the broader environment, since they are breaking up the single environment into smaller parts. However those smaller parts are giving focus to the smaller parts instead of to the larger whole. So, in a way, manga panels are getting both the environment and the detail of the objects.

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Unfortunately, my coding in this study was a little deficient, since at the time I lacked an "Amorphic" category that contains purely environmental information. These panels were coded as Micros at the time, but really should be their own category. On the plus side, I now have a larger and more diverse sample of comics to code and a richer coding scheme, I just need to get the peoplepower to do it (read: undergrad research assistants).

Update: An additional thought I just had related to this is the extant to which these claims are generalizable into two categories of East vs. West. At least regarding the graphic form, will we find that American books are the same/different as various European books? Can Japanese manga really be lumped in with Chinese, Korean, and other Asian comics' structure? Perhaps we'll find that there's a lot more diversity out there than we suspect...

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As the article says, this grows out of an older research program closely identified with Richard Nisbett, on East/West differences in cognition. According to Nisbett, East Asians are more "collectivist" and Westerners more "individualist" in their cognition, and this affects everything from selective perception and memory for figure/ground, attention to context, tolerance for ambiguity and contradiction, descriptions of persons, moral judgements, etc. etc. etc. One of the intriguing parts of this program is that the differences don't seem to be entirely fixed--you can get Westerners to show more Eastern responses and vice versa, through subtle yet idiotically simple manipulations. IIRC, they got Westerners thinking more "collectively" by having them read a passage of text with lots of first-person pronouns.

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I'm familiar with some of the East/West research, though it seems like its an over-generalization in a lot of ways. While I do think some of the claims may be well-founded, it's dangerous to lump in all Asians (or "Westerners") into a large homogenous group. Are there between-culture differences within those groups?

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It seems to me that the more frequent occurrence of "zooms" in Manga would be entirely consistent with the the tendency of Manga readers to focus as much on environment as figure. If you're creating work for a reader who perceives this way, and you want to get that reader to focus on a single figure, rather than the contextualized figure, then the obvious way to do that would be to leave the environment out entirely.

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