A natural bias for the basic level

• Main Authors: Annie Archambault, Frédéric Gosselin
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2000
• Subjects: Humpback Whale; Sperm whale
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.494.4121; http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/gosselif/labogo/ar_go_sc.pdf

It is well established that people can categorize the same objects at different levels of abstraction (i.e., superordinate, basic, and subordinate). Of these, the basic level is known to have a privileged status that is often attributed to the organization of categories in memory. Here, we argue that the bias could in part arise from the image formation process itself—i.e., the object properties for categorization that arise from the 2D retinal projections of distal 3D objects. In the real world, people do categorize objects from a variety of viewing distances and these modify the availability of object information on the retina. In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the information for basic categorizations is more resistant to changes in viewing distance than that of subordinate categorizations. Casual observers would experience little difficulty to categorize the animals in Figure 1 as exemplars of dog and those of Figure 2 as exemplars of whale. If they were “experts”, they could categorize these animals as Saint-Bernard dog, Doberman dog, Sperm whale, and Humpback whale. People can similarly apply different levels of category abstraction to the 3D distal objects that impinge on their retina. Rosch et al.’s (1976) seminal research isolated three “natural ” levels of object categorization: the superordinate (animal, vehicle, furniture), the basic (dog, car, chair), and the subordinate (Saint-Bernard dog, Porsche, Chippendale chair). Of these, the basic and subordinate are thought to be closer to perception and we will focus on their main differences. The former level is superior to the later in a number of ways: (1) Categories at the basic-level are verified fastest (see