EYE-TRACKING LITERACY EFFECTS IN FACE AND GRAPHISM RECOGNITION IN A NON-WEIRD POPULATION: THE KARAJA OF CENTRAL BRAZIL

Marcus Maia,
Aniela Improta França
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Abstract

This is an eye-tracking study of participants from a Brazilian indigenous ethnic group, Karajá, to measure the impact that reading may pose onto prior implicitly developed cognitions. We compared unschooled illiterate and literate participants concerning their eye gaze to: (i) faces of  Karaja , other indigenous and non-indigenous people; and also (ii) graphemes and (iii) graphisms produced by Karaja, other indigenous and western artists. Our findings suggest that literacy significantly affects the processing of faces: overcoming the left-right invariance, literate participants exhibit a more symmetric visual inspection of the faces (but not of graphics) than the illiterate ones, who do not necessarily inspect both sides of the faces, presenting average fixation times and fixation counts significantly higher on the right side of the faces. Moreover, literacy seems to somehow indirectly reinforce the own race bias: literate Karaja correctly identified the faces of their own ethnic group in 85% of cases, while the illiterates were correct in only 65% of trials. All in all, the findings brought about a less dogmatic examination of the interplay between cognitive and cultural factors in non-WEIRD populations, which offer the field an analytic framework in which these factors can be more harmoniously modulated to explain nature/nurture effects. The results allowed us to recast leading ideas in the field, concerning bottom-up algorithms and top-down heuristics which may have the potential to indicate that the relatively new area of studies on non-WEIRD societies should be taken seriously as a seminal source of explorations about deep longstanding concerns in the nature/nurture debate.

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