ИСТИНА

The objective of the study was to investigate into the possible influence of participants’ cultural backgrounds on the cognitive processing of visual semantic information. Cognitive patterns applied to semantic search are associated with the habitual perceptive schemes. Since these are formed in cultural and language environments, it was presupposed that visual semantic search task might reveal significant differences in cognitive strategies. Method. Russian, Japanese and Chinese students (n=64), sampled to form homogeneous groups in terms of experiment language mastery (the English language was used), took part in an eye-tracking experiment. Visual lexical search task was used to evaluate the influence of cultural and language experience on the strategies of cognitive processing. The participants were to search for English words through matrices filled in with seemingly random letters. The procedure included a questionnaire on the current state, lexical competence test and two experimental series. Semantic search success and eye-movement parameters were registered with SMIRED eye-tracker. The data were analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics. Results indicate that Japanese and Chinese participants experience more difficulty in recognizing words in sets of separate letters. Culture-specific reading skills, e.g., analyzing bigger semantic entities in hieroglyphic reading, seem to interfere with the experimental task which suggests a letter-by-letter consequential analysis. Eye-tracking data support this position, revealing significant differences in fixations and saccade characteristics, scan path lengths (twice as long in Asian groups (966,4 deg) as in the Russian one (587 deg) and directions (vertical orientation of the hidden words) as well as in visual processing modes. East-Asian respondents tend to use a scanning strategy of ambient vision with long saccades of high amplitude, while Russian respondents often use consequential focal search. The effect of false recognition or pseudowords identification was also noticed in the group of Asian students. Conclusion. Cultural and linguistic backgrounds have a deep impact on the cognitive processing. Perceptive analysis involves pre-trained schemes and patterns which can differ significantly across cultures.