Basic level categories
I’ve been waiting for someone to write about basic level categories as they relate to information architecture. No luck so far (apart from a 1999 Peterme post in which he says: ‘the trick would seem to be to get people to the basic-level as quickly as possible.’). So I’m picking this up again. There’s gold in them mountains folks!
Coginitive science has been making many discoveries about how humans categorize, like: that categories have fuzzy boundaries, that members of a category may be related to one another without all members having any property in common (this is called Family resemblance), that some members of a category may be �better examples� than others (this is called centralicity), and most interestingly, that categories are organized into a hierarchy from the most general to the most specific, but the level that is most cognitively basic is �in the middle� of the hierarchy. These categories in the middle are called basic level categories.
For example, “cat” is a basic level category, “feline” or “Siamese cat” are not.
Basic level categories have some characteristics that make them interesting for information architects:
- Things are remembered more readily at basic level.
- People name things more readily at basic level.
- The basic level name for things is learned earliest in childhood.
- Languages have simpler names at basic level.
In short, people naturally, at a deep cognitive level, deal easier with basic level categories.
It is important to understand that basic level categories are not just easier on a superficial level, because they are shorter or something. Cognitive scientists say that basic level categories are cognitively real. They seem to be ingrained in the human mind somehow, in a way that makes it easier for us to deal with basic level categories.
Does this mean that information architects should be aware of the basic levelness of the categories they use? I think so, but I’m not sure how exactly. Remember that basic level cateogories are processed more easily, faster. That has got to mean something to us!
The only research I found about basic level categories in information retrieval is Using ‘basic level categories’ to retrieve multimedia from the World-Wide-Web Hoenkamp, E.C.M. (1999). Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1999, 796.
Other interesting things I came across while doing research for this:
- one user�s classes are another user�s attributes.
- To test whether a category member is more or less central to the category, you can ask a series of questions, compare how long it takes people to answer.
Learn more:
- It’s all Eleanor Rosch’s fault, well explained by George Lakoff’s in Women, Fire and Dangerous things.
- More goodies.
November 22nd, 2003 at 10:03 am
Quite interesting, another thing I’d find interesting in the study is the variations of basic level categories in different cultures. I’d expect the basic level to be more granulated for things that are an important part of our culture, and very general for something we are dimly aware of.
I’d expect there to be variations between societies as well as between individuals, but I wonder about there amplitude. But then, maybe I’m wrong and there’s hardly any variation. It would seem pretty logical that a fisherman in an island village would have more granulated basic categories than “fish” …
November 22nd, 2003 at 10:04 am
Quite interesting, another thing I’d find interesting in the study is the variations of basic level categories in different cultures. I’d expect the basic level to be more granulated for things that are an important part of our culture, and very general for something we are dimly aware of.
I’d expect there to be variations between societies as well as between individuals, but I wonder about there amplitude. But then, maybe I’m wrong and there’s hardly any variation. It would seem pretty logical that a fisherman in an island village would have more granulated basic categories than “fish” …
November 22nd, 2003 at 10:07 am
(so either I posted the same comment twice and it isn’t being displayed (due to my proxy cache maybe ?), or it got lost somewhere …)
February 13th, 2004 at 6:03 pm
Your blog is certainly a great help when dealing with categories and the like.
It was one of my reads when setting up faceted categories in one of thre blogs I manage.
March 15th, 2004 at 1:16 pm
There are three notions that ly at the foundation of my answer:
1. The mind (conscience) of people reflects a FUNCTIONAL representation of the world. This means, we see the world by looking at “what can we do with it?” Interested? Read Hegel
2. The strength (or basic-levelness) of a concept (an abstraction) lies in the amount of time a person has spent on the concept and the amount of interest that a person has in the concept. The more time and the more interest the more “vivid” (basic-level) the concept becomes
3. Cluster analysis: there is some level of abstraction (which is leaving out unimportant characteristics) which occurs most
So what I am trying to say is that the basic-levelness of an abstraction (classification) depends fully on the person. It is that person who gives meaning to that class. And that person will give meaning based on the frequency and intensity (s)he deals with that class. It all depends on what a person finds important that makes a class a basic level class or not.
Peter, others, does this contribute?
March 16th, 2004 at 12:52 am
I’m not sure the cognitive scientists would agree with your nr.2 Not sure they wouldn’t either - just not sure they would.
May 30th, 2004 at 2:56 pm
I’m not sure that concept strength or vividness equates with basic-levelness. There are many other dimensions of concepts aside from basicness which may relate to such notions. What is true, however, is that expertise (time/interest?) in a particular domain will influence the level within a hierarchy of categories which displays the basic level advantage (see for eg Rosch et al., ‘76; Tanaka & Taylor, ‘91); specifically, the shift will be in the direction of the subordinate category.
May 30th, 2004 at 2:56 pm
I’m not sure that concept strength or vividness equates with basic-levelness. There are many other dimensions of concepts aside from basicness which may relate to such notions. What is true, however, is that expertise (time/interest?) in a particular domain will influence the level within a hierarchy of categories which displays the basic level advantage (see for eg Rosch et al., ‘76; Tanaka & Taylor, ‘91); specifically, the shift will be in the direction of the subordinate category.
December 19th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Wow…thats a deeper way to look at it…lol…very interesting
Fan of Don Lapre
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