Take a piece of paper and draw a circle.
Now that you’re done, you may think: how many different ways of drawing a circle can there be? Well, for example, you can start from the top or the bottom or any other point of the circle. You could also draw it clockwise or counterclockwise.
You could connect the beginning and end of the curve or not.Recently, Quartz made an analysis of 100,000 drawings collected from Google’s game Quick, draw! to see if there were cultural differences in the way people drew circles. Quick, draw! is a game designed to teach neural networks to recognize doodles. The game shows users a prompt word and gives them 20 seconds to draw the word.
The technology used in the game is similar to the one Google Translate uses to recognize handwriting. In order to recognize handwriting the algorithm learns not only the shape of the final character but also the direction and order of each stroke that was used to create it. So, each drawn doodle also contained data about the direction and order of strokes the user made to create it.
What Quartz found was that “the way you draw a simple circle is linked to geography and cultural upbringing, deep-rooted in hundreds of years of written language, and significant in developmental psychology and trends in education today.”
Our culture is reflected in myriad of behaviors. From the way we talk and look, to our preferences for food and music, our values, the way we see ourselves and even how fast we read (determined by how quickly we can process the information in a sentence). A study by Angela Leung and Dov Cohen measured how fast participants read certain key sentences in a story and found that, based on the reading speed, Asian Americans were significantly more likely to take their friend’s perspective than their own, while the opposite pattern held for Euro-Americans. This difference was probably rooted…
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