Prototype Approach

The Prototype Approach

According to a theory proposed by Eleanor Rosch, we organize each category on the basis of a prototype, which is the item that is most typical and representative of the category. According to this prototype approach, you decide whether an item belongs to a category by comparing that item with a prototype. If the item is similar to the prototype, you include that item in the category.

In some cases, the prototype of a category may not even exist. Rosch (1973) also emphasizes that members of a category differ in their prototypicality, or degree to which they are prototypical. A robin and a sparrow are very prototypical birds, whereas ostriches and penguins are nonprototypes.

The prototype approach represents a different perspective from the feature comparison Model. According to the feature comparison model, an item belongs to a category as long as it possesses the necessary and sufficient features (Markman, 1999). The feature comparison perspective therefore argues that category membership is very clear-cut. For example, for the category “bachelor,” the defining features are male and unmarried.

Eleanor Rosch and her coauthors, as well as other researchers, have conducted numerous studies on the characteristics of prototypes. Their research demonstrates that all members of categories are not created equal. Instead, a category tends to have a graded structure, beginning with the most representative or prototypical members and continuing on through the category’s nonprototypical members.

Characteristics of Prototypes. Prototypes differ from the nonprototypical members of categories in several respects.

1. Prototypes are supplied as examples of a category. Several studies have shown that people judge some items to be better examples of a concept than other items.

2. Prototypes are judged more quickly after semantic priming. The semantic priming effect means that people respond faster to an item if it was preceded by an item with similar meaning.

3. Prototypes share attributes in a family resemblance category. Before we examine this issue, let’s introduce a new term, family resemblance. Family resemblance means that no single attribute is shared by all examples of a concept; however, each example has at least one attribute in common with some other example of the concept.

Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlyingcognition,^[1] with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both psychology and neuroscience, overlapping with disciplines such as physiological psychology, cognitive psychologyand neuropsychology.^[2] Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neuropsychology and computational modeling.

Methods employed in cognitive neuroscience include experimental paradigms from psychophysics and cognitive psychology, functional neuroimaging, electrophysiology, cognitive genomics and behavioral genetics.

Cognitive neuroscience can look at the effects of damage to the brain and subsequent changes in the thought processes due to changes in neural circuitry resulting from the ensued damage. Also, cognitive abilities based on brain development is studied and examined under the subfield of developmental cognitive neuroscience.

“Cognitive Psychology is the study of thinking and the processes underlying mental events.”