Orient and Occident
Over at ~ oranckay ~ today is posted a link to this article that he suggests might offer some explanation as to "why Asians can’t seem to get the point or why Americans have to be so darn linear all the time": In Asia, the Eyes Have It.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers....

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.

The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.

The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.

In the latest test, the researchers tracked the eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they looked at pictures.

The Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner -- a leopard in the jungle for example -- and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background, he said.

Reinforcing the belief that the differences are cultural, he said, when Asians raised in North America were studied, they were intermediate between native Asians and European-Americans, and sometimes closer to Americans in the way they viewed scenes.