Eleanor Rosch

Eleanor Rosch (* 1938) is an American professor of cognitive psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Research results

Eleanor Rosch received her doctorate ( Ph.D.) in 1969 from Harvard University. With their prototype theory she combined psychological, and linguistic research, and promoted the development of prototype semantics. Eleanor Rosch found that people proceed with the categorization of objects of everyday life less by abstract criteria, but focusing more on representative representatives (prototypes).

To fulfill eg penguins, hummingbirds and emus the criterion " has feathers ," which allows them to be categorized as birds. Intuitively, however, people tend to categorize according to the proximity to the prototypical member of this category, eg a blackbird or pigeon.

Since this distance varies the prototype, so you can in addition to a binary membership (belonging to the category or not ) a gradual belonging to a category described (trout is a good example of the category " fish"; eels are then against more ' bad' representatives ).