Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder?

doi:10.1016/0010-0285(91)90016-H

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 23, Issue 3, July 1991, Pages 457-482

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(91)90016-H Get rights and content

Abstract

Classic research on conceptual hierarchies has shown that the interaction between the human perceiver and objects in the environment specifies one level of abstraction for categorizing objects, called the basic level, which plays a primary role in cognition. The question of whether the special psychological status of the basic level can be modified by experience was addressed in three experiments comparing the performance of subjects in expert and novice domains. The main findings were that in the domain of expertise (a) subordinate-level categories were as differentiated as the basic-level categories, (b) subordinate-level names were used as frequently as basic-level names for identifying objects, and (c) subordinate-level categorizations were as fast as basic-level categorizations. Taken together, these results demonstrate that individual differences in domain-specific knowledge affect the extent that the basic level is central to categorization.

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Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder?

Abstract

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Science

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Cognitive Psychology

International Journal of Man-Machine Studies

Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of instantiation as determinants of graded structure in categories

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories: A replication and extension of the Connecticut category norms

Journal of Experimental Psychology Monograph

Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding

Psychological Review

Sexing day-old chicks: A case study and expert systems analysis of a difficult perceptual-learning task

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

How should a thing be called?

Psychological Review

The pragmatics of lexical specificity

Journal of Linguistics

Why faces are and are not special: An effect of expertise

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Salience and relativity in classification

American Ethnologist