I remember doing these in classes in high school and university. Always interesting.
On a related note, a friend I visited in South Korea who at the time was teaching English showed me a magazine cover and asked me to tell him what I saw.
I said, "Well, there's a beach, a dog, a beach ball, an ocean, a boat, a blue sky, and a cloud."
And he said, "That's very interesting. Most Americans and Europeans would say the same thing. But if you ask a Korean, he or she would say, 'There's a dog sitting on the beach. The dog is looking at the cloud in the sky. There's a boat behind the dog, out on the ocean.' When Westerners look at things, they see discrete, individual items. When people from Asia look at things, though, they pay a lot more attention to the context: where is one thing in relation to others, what's it doing, etc."
It reminded me of a study (
here) I saw that tracked eye movements of Americans and Chinese while looking at a picture of a tiger in a clearing. The Americans' eye movements tracked almost entirely on the tiger, while the Chinese's eye movements tracked all around the tiger, as well as on it. It turned out that the Americans zero in on looking at the individual elements, while the Chinese focus on how all the elements of the picture tie in together.
Chase
