Abstract

Adults raised in East Asian cultures exhibit holistic attentional biases, focusing more on contextual information such as the background, compared to adults from North American cultures, who prioritize the foreground. Caregivers were observed to transmit these biases to the children. This study explored the cultural tendencies and attentional biases of caregivers in the rapidly changing Korean cultural context, and whether these tendencies and biases influenced the relational reasoning performance of their children aged 18 to 36 months. Analyses of 83 mothers showed that Korean mothers valued both individualism and horizontal collectivism but they emphasized the foreground over the background in scene descriptions, reflecting analytic attentional biases. However, no apparent influence of maternal cultural tendencies was observed in their child’s relational reasoning performance, suggesting that cultural influences may not yet play a direct role in development at this early stage.