Q.How do socio-cultural factors influence our perceptions?

Psychologists have long investigated whether the basic processes of perceptual organisation work in exactly the same way for everyone everywhere, or whether they vary depending on the particular cultural setting a person is raised and lives in. Because people from different regions of the world visibly look different from one another and inhabit very different physical and built environments, many psychologists have reasoned that their characteristic, habitual ways of perceiving the world might also differ in certain specific respects, even while the basic biological apparatus of perception (the eyes, the visual pathways, the brain) remains essentially the same across all humans. One influential line of comparative research, associated with Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits, tested how susceptible different groups were to well-known geometrical illusions such as the Muller-Lyer illusion and the vertical-horizontal illusion, comparing samples drawn from remote African villages against samples drawn from Western urban settings. This research found that African participants showed greater susceptibility to the vertical-horizontal illusion, while Western participants showed greater susceptibility to the Muller-Lyer illusion -- a pattern subsequently confirmed by further studies. One proposed explanation links this difference to each group's characteristic physical environment: people living amid dense forests are regularly exposed to very tall vertical objects, such as trees, and through this repeated experience develop a tendency to overestimate vertical length; people living in Western, heavily 'carpentered' environments, dominated by rectangular buildings and sharp right-angled corners, are instead regularly exposed to enclosed, arrowhead-like angles, and develop a corresponding tendency to underestimate the length of lines bounded by such angles. This general finding -- that specific habits of percep …