Culture literally changes how we see the world. Really!

It is called living in a bubble! Same old story since ancient times! Nothing really new here! I doubt it is a cultural difference!

The Greek philosopher Plato described this phenomenon around 515 BCE in what is referred to as the Allegory of the Cave.

"... Scientists have been documenting differences in how people around the world see optical illusions for more than a century. But past examples all rely on just three basic types of illusions, and scientists can’t agree about what they mean. Some have dismissed the cultural differences as products of “high-level” processes such as attention that are layered on top of a deeper, universal visual system. Others think deeper processes are also shaped by experience, while still others reject the whole concept that vision happens in hierarchical layers. ...

For four of the study’s six illusions, what the Himba saw was overwhelmingly different from what people from the U.S. and U.K. saw, with people from the Namibian town falling somewhere in between. For example, one image featured wavy lines that look like zigzags, whereas another had parallel lines that appear slanted. Most Himba villagers saw both sets of lines as they really are, not falling for the pattern and shading elements that trick most people from industrialized societies. And for the Coffer illusion, a full 97% of U.S. and U.K. participants saw rectangles first. In the Himba villages, however, 96% of people saw circles first. ..."

From the abstract:

"Vision science largely ignores the fact that rural visual environments typical of our species’ history differ radically from urban zones from which almost all samples are drawn: Only a handful of paradigms have been used to investigate rural-urban differences in visual perception, and some show limited effects or suffer from limited methodologies.

Here we more than double the total number of paradigms in this literature, including visual illusions assumed to rely on universal mechanisms (e.g. Gestalt shapes, Cafe wall, curvature blindness).

Results reveal profound differences in visual phenomenology, with rural Namibian participants often failing to see percepts obvious to UK/US participants and vice versa.

In sum, what is universal and what is culturally-constructed in human visual perception remains a wide-open area of research."

Culture literally changes how we see the world | Science | AAAS "Where city dwellers see rectangles, people who live in round huts see circles"

Visual illusions reveal wide range of cross-cultural differences in visual perception (open access, preprint)

Flammarion engraving of a man looking out of the bubble 1888 CE (Source)