Toward a cultural-sensitive image tagging interface

Do people from different cultures tag digital images differently? The current study examined the relationship between the position and content of tags for digital images created by participants from two cultural groups (European Americans and Chinese). In line with previous findings on cultural differences in attentional patterns, we found cultural differences in the order of the parts of images people chose to tag. European Americans tended to tag main objects first, and tag background objects and overall properties in the images later; in contrast, Chinese tended to tag the overall properties first, and tag the main and background objects later. Based on findings of the current study, we discuss implications on developing a cultural-sensitive algorithm to facilitate the tagging and search process of digital media and data-mining tools to identify user profiles based on their cultural origins.