File this under awesome generalisations:

Face-Off: East vs. West — Zelkowitz 2008 (820): 3 — ScienceNOW

[…]

The eye-tracker confirmed that Westerners tend to dart from the eyes to the mouth and back again. Conversely, the East Asian students fixated on central points in the face, which the researchers believe enables them to view all its information at once, they report today in PLoS ONE. Both groups scored about the same on the recognition and categorization tasks, showing their methods were equally effective in identifying faces, Caldara notes. “In this difference, there is still something common and universal.”

Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says the findings fit with other research on culture and visual perception. Speaking broadly, says Nisbett, people in East Asian cultures tend to prize collectivism and harmony above the individuality valued in Western cultures. These social values are so powerful, he says, that they may influence a trait biologists previously thought was hard-wired in our species.