According to previous studies, East Asians and Westerners differ on both perceptual and cognitive measures, with East Asians tending to show more abstract levels of perception and cognition than Westerners (McKone et al., 2010; Singh et al., 2019; Swallow&Wang, 2020). The current study aimed to investigate whether differences in visual attention can drive previously observed cross-cultural differences in cognition. Specifically, we tested whether orienting US participants to attend to visual stimuli at either an abstract (global) or concrete (local) level of organization can affect how abstractly they construe everyday events based on verbal descriptions. In a two-part experiment, participants were first randomly assigned to judge hierarchically constructed shapes (e.g., a large triangle composed of small squares) at either the global or local level. Next, all participants completed the Behavioral Identification Form (BIF), a measure of event construal shown previously to elicit more abstract responses from Chinese participants than from US participants. The results showed no significant effect of the hierarchical shape manipulation, failing to support the predicted relationship between abstraction in visual perception and event construal.