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.