Page 254 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

260 Eleanor Rosch

judgments are reliable even under changes of instructions and items (Rips,
Shoben, and Smith 1973; Rosch 1975b, 1975c; Rosch and Mervis 1975). Were
such agreement and reliability in judgment not to have been obtained, there
would be no further point in discussion or investigation of the issue. However,
given the empirical verification of degree of prototypicality, we can proceed to
ask what principles determine which items will be judged the more proto-
typical and what other variables might be affected by prototypicality.
In terms of the basic principles of category formation, the formation of cate-
gory prototypes should, like basic levels of abstraction, be determinate and be
closely related to the initial formation of categories. For categories of concrete
objects (which do not have a physiological basis, as categories such as colors
and forms apparently do—Rosch 1974), a reasonable hypothesis is that proto-
types develop through the same principles such as maximization of cue validity
1
and maximization of category resemblance as those principles governing the
formation of the categories themselves.
In support of such a hypothesis, Rosch and Mervis (1975) have shown that
the more prototypical of a category a member is rated, the more attributes it
has in common with other members of the category and the fewer attributes
in common with members of the contrasting categories. This finding was dem-
onstrated for natural language superordinate categories, for natural language
basic-level categories, and for artificial categories in which the definition of
attributes and the amount of experience with items was completely specified
and controlled. The same basic principles can be represented in ways other
than through attributes in common. Because the present theory is a structural
theory, one aspect of it is that centrality shares the mathematical notions in-
herent in measures like the mean and mode. Prototypical category members
have been found to represent the means of attributes that have a metric, such as
size (Reed 1972; Rosch, Simpson, and Miller 1976).
In short, prototypes appear to be just those members of a category that most
reflect the redundancy structure of the category as a whole. That is, if cate-
gories form to maximize the information-rich cluster of attributes in the envi-
ronment and, thus, the cue validity or category resemblance of the attributes
of categories, prototypes of categories appear to form in such a manner as to
maximize such clusters and such cue validity still further within categories.
It is important to note that for natural language categories both at the super-
ordinate and basic levels, the extent to which items have attributes common to
the category was highly negatively correlated with the extent to which they
have attributes belonging to members of contrast categories. This appears to be
part of the structure of real-world categories. It may be that such structure is
given by the correlated clusters of attributes of the real world. Or such struc-
ture, may be a result of the human tendency once a contrast exists to define
attributes for contrasting categories so that the categories will be maximally
distinctive. In either case, it is a fact that both representativeness within a cate-
gory and distinctiveness from contrast categories are correlated with proto-
typicality in real categories. For artificial categories, either principle alone will
produce prototype effects (Rosch et al. 1976b; Smith and Balzano, personal
communication) depending on the structure of the stimulus set. Thus to per-
form experiments to try to distinguish which principle is the one that deter-