Ad-hoc categories and information architecture
Ad Hoc Categorizations and the Emergence of Context Effects: "We discuss how marketers may actively affect categorization processes to increase product appeal, for example, in brand extensions and other category-based product evaluations." Evil marketing.
I am looking at Ad-hoc categories (and came across the link above) and what they mean for information architecture.
Ad-hoc categories are categories like "things to take on a camping trip" - they can be created immediately and form a category, even if they didn't exist before. I believe that's the definition. In other words, they are categories made up as we go along, not retrieved from memory.
They have specific properties (for example, their members can have nothing in common other than the fact of their membership, while still showing graded membership effects, which means that some members are better examples than others.)
I think Amazon's "People who bought this book also bought" is an ad-hoc category - it's made up as we go along, but by a computer, not by a human. Although the category does have meaning for us, so maybe I should say it's populated by a computer - not created by a computer.
Of course, your copy of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things has some things to say about ad hoc categories, and Lawrence W. Barsalou did research talking about how these really are goal-derived categories. I look at ad-hoc categories as a bit broader than goal-derived categories. The Amazon example isn't goal-derived, for example (I think), but it's ad-hoc, and I don't think that's because it is populated by a computer.
Barsalou's research suggests that ad-hoc categories have an implicit goal (not sure I agree), and that the graded structure these categories show (some members are better examples than other members) results from the degree to which an object helps to attain the implicit goal.
I'm just starting my investigations into this particular intersection of information architecture and cognitive psychology, any ideas and pointers are very welcome.