Excuse me, sir. That's a trash barrel. A guest post by Sal Schiano

Have you ever been to a fast food drive thru and tried to order your food through one of these…

                    ?

If you are like most people this may happen every now and again when you are distracted by other things or just having a rough day. A possible explanation for why this happens is as follows.

Our brains are essentially just incredibly fast computers, but they need some shortcuts to operate efficiently. We tend to categorize different concepts, through a process by which things are placed into groups, or categories. Once you know something is in a certain category you know a lot more about it. For example, because this trash barrel above does not look like your average trash barrel and is usually positioned right next to the menu at a drive thru window, it is harder for your mind to categorize it. The real purpose of the barrel is to make the trash toss from your car a bit easier. However if you are hungry and distracted staring off at the menu you may start to call out your order into the shoot of the barrel, misperceiving it as the order window.

Why does this happen? Because it looks just like something you would talk into…it also does not look like a normal trash barrel. Your rules for the category “trash barrel” may be a container that is round/square and open, holds trash and has a bad odor.

At first glance this does not fit into your rules of a trash barrel. Nor does it look like a typical member, or a prototype, of the trash barrel category, meaning it has low prototypicallity. This barrel also does not look like any other trash barrel you have seen in the past. For you, an exemplar of a trash barrel looks more like this…

               or this 

Hopefully though, you realize that the drive thru trash barrel does have some similar characteristics to the barrel you know, such as smell, and that it actually might be a trash barrel that you are ordering into. At that point you’d probably play it off, toss something in, drive up to the correct window, and order your food.

So why are categories important?

They allow us to recognize new things. After taking a second gander and realizing that the drive thru barrel really looks like a trash barrel, just with a funky attachment on top, we realize that it fits into the category of a trash barrel.

Once we realize the category we understand how to use it. Or in this case how not to use it, and we behave appropriately i.e. stop talking into a trash barrel.