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

By James W. Tanaka, Marjorie Taylor. 1991

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF OBJECT CATEGORIZATION IN YOUNG CHILDREN: HIERARCHICAL INCLUSIVENESS, AGE, PERCEPTUAL ATTRIBUTE, AND GROUP VERSUS INDIVIDUAL ANALYSES (2010, background): “Tanaka and Taylor (1991), who examined categorization at three levels of inclusiveness in adults in a within-subjects design, found that expertise in a domain equated subordinate with basic level categorization.”
How consumers perceive product appearance: The identification of three product appearance attributes (2009, background): “Additionally, non-professionals seem to categorize on different abstraction levels than experts, also suggesting they have a more shallow knowledge of design vocabulary (Tanaka & Taylor, 1991).”
Universality and language specificity in object naming (2003, background): “…it has been suggested that different populations of people make their primary categorizations at different levels of abstraction, reflecting their level of expertise in the domain (e.g., Berlin, 1992; Dougherty, 1978; Johnson & Mervis, 1997; Rosch et al., 1976; Tanaka & Taylor, 1991).”
Collaborative Creation of Communal Hierarchical Taxonomies in Social Tagging Systems (2006, background): “information see the discussion in [11] and the original [19].”
Visual categorization shapes feature selectivity in the primate temporal cortex (2002, background): “For example, a bird expert is more likely to recognize a bird as a sparrow, a sandpiper or a cockatiel than a non-exper”
Reducing Satiation: The Role of Categorization Level (2008, background): “All three indexes displayed an acceptable level of consistency as the Cronbach’s alphas ranged from .77 to .85.”
The role of intuitive heuristics in students' thinking: Ranking chemical substances (2010, background): “…example, central findings in the novice–expert research literature indicate that although novices and experts recognize similar surface features, experts can use their prior knowledge to build meaningful understandings regardless of the form of representation (Glaser, 1989; Tanaka & Taylor, 1991).”
The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems (2005, background): “Recall that “basic levels” are related to the way in which humans interact with the items at those levels (Tanaka & Taylor 1991); when one interacts with the outside world, one makes sense of the things one encounters by categorizing them and ascribing meaning to them.”
Evolution and Devolution of Knowledge: A Tale of Two Biologies (2004, background): “There is evidence that biological experts have a more specific basic level than novices, but this describes results from a novice perspective (Dougherty 1978; Johnson & Mervis 1997;Tanaka & Taylor 1991).”
The Five-Factor Framing of Personality and Beyond: Some Ruminations (2010, background): “Third, there is widespread acceptance in medical and other fields that specialists can validly discern and effectively communicate to others distinctions not discernible by laypeople (see, eg, Tanaka & Taylor, 1991 ).”
Social Categorization and the Perception of Social Groups (2012, background): “…differentiation is maximized at the basic level, making it the most generally useful place for making conceptual distinctions (Markman & Wisniewski, 1997), although people with extensive domain expertise may make greater use of more subordinate levels of a category (Tanaka & Taylor, 1991).”