The Entry Point in the Identification of Familiar Objects
Barbara Bazzanella, Paolo Bouquet · 2011
Abstract—This paper reports an experiment which explores whether there is a preferential level of abstraction that serves as the entry point in identification of familiar objects. In a category-verification task the participants were presented with a category label and asked to indicate whether a picture presented a brief time later was an example of the category. Familiar entities from three different categories of objects (artwork, building and product) and unfamiliar entities from three contrasting categories (home furnishing, utensil and musical instrument) were categorized at three different levels of abstraction (superordinate, basic and subordinate). We found that participants were faster to identify familiar entities at the unique level of identity (subordinate level) than they were to verify them at the basic level. On the contrary, verification times for unfamiliar entities were faster at the basic level than at the subordinate level. These results suggest that the entry point of familiar entities is shifted to the most subordinate level of abstraction in object identification (i.e., the level of singular concepts). Implications of these findings for the basic level advantage effect are discussed. Keywords-entry point; singular concepts; basic level advan-tage; unique level of identity. I.