Some readings about Western and Eastern cognitive styles

Today I have resumed contact with a professor in Zayed University, Dr. Emad Bataineh, who I knew in the EyeTracking UX Conference in London (June 2011). We planned to do a research together and compare users's behavior in SERPs in two countries: Spain and UAE.

Looking for a start point I have found the PhD Thesis of Jolin Adeeb Qutub (director Frederick J. Brigham) who assess that "[...] Recent studies have concluded that Western learners tend to have more analytical perceptual learning style whereas East Asians tend to have more holistic or contextual perceptual learning style (Nisbett & Norenzayan, 2002). Only a limited number of studies have examined cognitive perceptual differences between Middle Eastern and Western learners. This study aimed to help close this research gap by exploring cognitive perceptual differences among three groups who come from different cultural backgrounds: Saudi Arabians, immigrants living in the United States, and Americans [...] ".

I have collected some references from the thesis:

• Chua, H., Boland, J. and Nisbett, R. (2005). Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 12629-12633
• Masuda, T., & Nisbett. R. (2001). Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922–934.
• Nisbett, R. (2004). The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why. New York: Free Press.
• Nisbett, R., & Miyamoto, Y. (2005). The influence of culture: Holistic versus analytic perception. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 467-473
• Nisbett, R.E., & Norenzayan, A. (2002). Culture and cognition. In H. Pashler & D. L. Medin (Eds.), Stevens Handbook of Experimental Psychology : Cognition (3d Ed., Vol. 2) (pp. 561-597). New York: John Wiley & Sons. [PDF]
• Nisbett, R.E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291-310. [PDF]
• Stevens, Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Vol 2. (3rd ed., pp. 561-597), New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
• Norenzayan, E., Smith, E., Beom, J., & Nisbett, R. (2002). Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning. Cognitive Science, 26, 653–684.

And one more that I might need for this and other studies:

• Hink, D. E., Wiersma, W., & Jurs, S. G., (1988). Applied Statistics For The Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed). Boston: Houghton Mifflin

If this study becomes a reality, I think the results can be very interesting. Let's see!