Elsevier

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 8, Issue 3, July 1976, Pages 382-439
Cognitive Psychology

Basic objects in natural categories

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(76)90013-XGet rights and content

Abstract

Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most differentiated from one another. The four experiments of Part I define basic objects by demonstrating that in taxonomies of common concrete nouns in English based on class inclusion, basic objects are the most inclusive categories whose members: (a) possess significant numbers of attributes in common, (b) have motor programs which are similar to one another, (c) have similar shapes, and (d) can be identified from averaged shapes of members of the class. The eight experiments of Part II explore implications of the structure of categories. Basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment, to be the earliest categories sorted and earliest named by children, and to be the categories most codable, most coded, and most necessary in language.

References (50)

  • L.R. Beach

    Cue probabilism and inference behavior

    Psychological Monographs

    (1964)
  • L.R. Beach

    Recognition, assimilation, and identification of objects

    Psychological Monographs

    (1964)
  • H.K. Beller

    Priming: Effects of advance information on matching

    Journal of Experimental Psychology

    (1971)
  • B. Berlin

    Speculations on the growth of ethnobotanical nomenclature

    Language in Society

    (1972)
  • B. Berlin et al.

    Folk taxonomies and biological classification

    Science

    (1966)
  • B. Berlin et al.

    General principles of classification and nomenclature in folk biology

    American Anthropologist

    (1973)
  • R. Brown
  • J.S. Bruner et al.
  • E. Brunswik
  • R. Bulmer

    Why is the cassowary not a bird? A problem of zoological taxonomy among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands

    Man: the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

    (1967)
  • R. Bulmer et al.

    Karam classification of frogs

    The Journal of the Polynesian Society

    (1968)
  • N.W. Denney

    Evidence for developmental changes in categorization criteria for children and adults

    Human Development

    (1974)
  • C.O. Frake

    The ethnographic study of cognitive systems

  • Cited by (0)

    This research was supported by grants to the first author (under her former name Eleanor Rosch Heider) by the National Science Foundation GB-38245X, by The Grant Foundation, and by the National Institutes of Mental Health 1 R01 MH24316-01. Portions of these data were presented in papers delivered at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, November 1974 and at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, April, 1975.

    1

    She was a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow during performance of the research.

    View full text