Human perception is not a passive recording of reality but an active, culturally shaped act of meaning-making. This study examined how people from the United Kingdom, Chile, and Japan sketch to separate foreground from background, revealing cultural signatures in spatial and temporal attention. Ninety landscape images (thirty per country) were presented in a digital drawing task in which participants (N = 99) delineated focal and contextual regions. Using brush-stroke coordinates and reaction-time data, three spatial indices—Intersection-over-Union (precision), Entropy (dispersion), and the Angular Consensus Index (agreement)—were integrated with temporal measures to capture both where and when attention unfolds. Chilean participants showed the highest precision and fastest drawing tempo, reflecting an integrative-analytic focus; Japanese participants displayed broader dispersion and slower tempo, consistent with holistic, context-sensitive attention; and British participants exhibited balanced, analytic–contextual patterns. A human–machine comparison revealed that object-centred computer-vision models aligned most closely with the Chilean group, while Japanese participants’ context-driven segmentation diverged from computational norms. These findings introduce the Cultural Spatial–Temporal Attention (CSTA) framework, linking perceptual organisation and decision-making tempo across societies and systems. By demonstrating that both human and artificial vision bear the imprint of cultural and architectural bias, this research contributes a validated cross-cultural image set and analytic tool for advancing visual-cognitive science, art-based assessment, and ethical AI design.

Authors:
Tayebeh Ourtani, Queen Mary university of London, United Kingdom
Valdas Noreika, Queen Mary University, United Kingdom
Janelle Jones, Queen Mary University of Loo, United Kingdom
Isabelle Mareschal, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Yuri Miyamoto, Hitotsubashi University, Japan
Pablo Sebastián Fossa Arcila, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile

About the Presenter(s)
Tayebeh Ourtani is a researcher in cognition and culture at the Brain and Behaviour Centre at Queen Mary University of London. She is a graduate member of the British Psychological Society. Her research explores the intricate relationship between culture and cognition, with a particular focus on how cultural factors shape visual attention, thinking styles, and mental health. Her work investigates cultural differences in cognitive processes, emphasising spatial attention, emotional expression, and the intersection of cognitive patterns and mental well-being.

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