In an insightful study, reviewed in Science magazine (which doesn't seem to allow online access to it) researchers found that individuals from different religious backgrounds have a different focus in images, with some focusing on the background and others on individuals that are present in an image. This difference parallels the one found across cultures, notably Westerners and Asians, with Westerners focusing less on the context and more on discrete items, such as individual persons, and Asians focusing more on the context rather than individuals in the same image. The interesting part here about religion is that it seems to be a dimension of one's upbringing that conditions visual perception irrespective of culture.
the reviewed study in Science appeared in the journal Cognition, 117, 2010
