Categories of environmental scenes

doi:10.1016/0010-0285(83)90006-3

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 15, Issue 1, January 1983, Pages 121-149

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(83)90006-3 Get rights and content

Abstract

Environmental scenes are the settings in which human action occurs; since they constrain behavior, they are of interest to social, personality, and environmental psychologists. Scenes can also be viewed as a spatial generalization of objects, as well as the spatial contexts in which objects appear. As such, they are studied in perception and memory. Previous approaches to characterizing environments have relied on scaling techniques to yield a manageable number of dimensions or attributes by which environments can be compared. In contrast, the present research demonstrates development of a taxonomy of kinds of environmental scenes, where perceived attributes are obtained as a byproduct. A basic or preferred level of categorization in the taxonomy is also identified, based on measures of cognition, behavior, and communication. The basic level, for example, school, home, beach, mountains, corresponds to the level commonly used in the study of scene schemas in perception, memory, and environmental psychology, as well as to the level apparently most useful in other domains of knowledge concerned with environments, for example, architecture and geography.

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^☆: This research was supported by NSF Grant BSN 8002012 and by NIMH Grant MH-34248 to Stanford University.

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Categories of environmental scenes☆

Abstract

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Cognitive Psychology

Ethnobiological classification

General principles of classification and nomenclature in folk biology

American Anthropologist

On the semantics of a glance at a scene

Folk botanical life-forms: Their universality and growth

American Anthropologist

Folk zoological life-forms: Their universality and growth

American Anthropologist

How shall a thing be called?

Psychological Review

Prototypes in person perception

Psychiatric diagnosis as prototype categorization

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

“Purpose” in a cognitive theory of reference

Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society

Context for comprehension

Environmental psychology

Annual Review of Psychology

The pragmatics of lexical specificity

Journal of Linguistics