PSYCH 111 Chapter Notes - Chapter II: Prototype Theory, Eleanor Rosch
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The behavioral scientists who focus on these sorts of questions ( why"s a shoe called a shoe? ) study human cognition (thinking) and perception (humans" interpretation of the world around them). Concepts are mental representations of your experiences of the world that allow you to classify objects (furniture, vegetables, animals, professions, shoes, etc. ) according to the characteristics they have in common. Concepts and categories should vary from culture to culture due to variations in language. For many years, of the origin of concepts was taken for granted by scientists throughout the social sciences in psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology. Eleanor rosch (university of california at berkeley) proposed that categories do not necessarily arise from language, but exist naturally on their own, in relation to humans" biological abilities of perception. Rosch argued that most categories do not have clear boundaries as to what fits and what does not, but rather, our mental category borders are fuzzy .
