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Eleanor Rosch (once known as Eleanor Rosch Heider) was born in 1938, she now lives and works as a professor of psychology in the United states of America. Rosch is most well known for her work on categorization as well as the formation of the Prototype theory within the field of cognitive Science. Her research has been influential in many fields. Rosch has conducted extensive research focusing on topics that include semantic categorization, mental representation of concepts, linguistics and prototype theory.

Rosch's research interests include cognition, concepts, causality, thinking, memory, and cross-cultural, Eastern, and religious psychology. Most recently her focus on psychology of religion has shown the implications of Buddhism.

Biography

Career and Education

UC Berkley Clock Tower.

Eleanor Rosch is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkely, in the department of Psychology and the program in cognitive science. Rosch received her B.A. with a thesis in philosophy from Reed College and earned her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1969.

Her research in the 1970s demonstrated that when people label an everyday object the rely on a comparison with what they regard as the best representative of the category designated by that word. Through field work that Rosch conducted with the Dani Tribe of New Guinea she was able to show that although their language lacks words for colours other than black or white, they are still able to distinguish among other colours. She extended this finding to all cultures, arguing that people from different cultures tend to categorize in the same manner. This finding contradicted the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that language effects the extent to which people can understand concepts for which their language does not have a words for.

Categorization

Research by Eleanor Rosch has focused a great deal on mental representations of natural categories. Rosch argues that one of the most basic functions of humans and all living things id to categorize. The human world is highly Categorized. In her research a category is defined by a number of objects that are considered equivalent. Categorization is an unconscious processes that does not undergo any significant development during ones lifetime. Objects can be categorized in hierarchical levels, in either subordinate, basic or superordinate levels. Rosch has proposed that categories are structured within taxonomies of concrete objects for which there is one level of inclusiveness; from here basic category cuts can be made. In contrast to many other cognitive scientists, Rosch Proposed that natural categories are continuous and possess a structure in which members are ordered based on the degree to which they are judged to be a good example of the category and based on similarity to other category members. Rosch identified two levels of organization within categorization. The first consisting of a vertical hierarchical level of inclusiveness. The second level is that of a horizontal orientation, this level consists of categorical segmentation within the same vertical level. Rosch along with other psychologists have argued that the basic level of categorization is that which the categories maximize within-category similarities relative to between-category similarities. Categorization of Prototypes may obey psychological laws, producing naturally structured categories. Objects which are categorized in this basic level are more rapidly recognized than objects stored at any other level. Cognitive representations of semantic categories is directly relevant to two areas of psychological inquiry. The first is focused on the structure of categories which has implications for the ways in which categorization should be studied. The second area is the nature of mental representations themselves. Through further research Rosch has discovered that categorizations that are made about the concrete world are highly determined by psychological principles. Rosch conducted studies to test her theories of natural categorization.she believed that semantic categories were developed around natural prototypes. Rosch introduced the idea of a reference points within a category. In order for a concept to be a reference point, it must be one which other concepts are seen in relation to; however it is extremely difficult to establish which concept is in relation to which others.

Principles of Categorization

Rosch attributed the formation to categories to two fundamental principles. The principle states that the task of a category is to provide maximum information while requiring the least amount of cognitive effort. This principle uses the logical notion that categories are useful for gaining a large amount of information while conserving resources and effort as much as possible. The second principle responsible for categorization is focused on the structure of information. It states that the perceived world contains structured information rather than arbitrary attributes. This principle suggests that objects within the concrete world are part of a highly correlated structure. Two further principles were later added by Rosch. The first of the new principles states that there is a basic level of abstraction, here the ration of similar to distinct features should be maximized. The second principle that was added by Rosch that there is a required existence of reference items to which other category items may be judged against.

Family Resemblances

An important area of focus of Rosch’s research is the idea of family resemblances of categories. The concept of family resemblances counters the all-or-nothing phenomenon that was the original basis of categories. It instead supports the idea that category members vary in degrees of representativeness. Concepts which share a greater degree of overlap with other members of a category are considered to have a greater family resemblance. Eleanor has stated that the structure of categories can be divided into prototype members, which serve as the best examples of the category, and nonprotoype members, which are the poorer examples of the category. Research has discovered that more prototypical items share a greater family resemblance to other members within the same category, and share little family resemblance to items in other categories.

Prototype Theory

Rosch and her colleagues developed the prototype theory which further enhanced the theory of categorization. This prototype theory was presented in the form of a mathematical model. One explanation for prototypes are that they are the objects which have the mean values of quantifiable attributes of the category to which they belong . However research conducted by Rosch has supported the hypothesis that a prototype is defined as the member of a category which has the most attributes in common with other members of the same category and the least attributes that same with members of another category. Items other than the Prototype of a category are then judged in relation to the prototype. The concepts of prototypes have been used in social psychology, personality psychology and clinical psychology. Prototypes are exceptionally sensitive to context. while in one situation a specific concept may act as the prototype of a given category, the prototype may change in a different context within the same category. This is referred to as context effects, which states that words and concepts are interpreted in different ways in different contexts.It has been argued that based on this fact that prototypes change depending on the context, that prototypes are not pre-stored instead they are created for every new situation. A significant area of debate regarding prototype theory is concerned with the level of abstraction involved in category representation.

Concepts

Another topic within psychology that Rosch devoted much of her research to was that of concepts. she described concepts as the mechanism that enables one to interpret situations in terms of similarities to previously encountered situations. Concepts can be either concrete or abstract. Rosch states that concepts helps humans to learn about the world around them and can help them to invent new things. One perspective about concepts that is becoming more generally recognized is that they have no fixed representational structure. Rosch and her colleagues introduced the idea of a graded membership of concepts. Concepts may have a great deal of members, however it is likely that some members are more representative of the concept than others. It is important to note that this theory of graded concepts held the notion that concepts and categories are based on real world structure rather than logic. Another significant attribute of concepts it that they are all tied to a larger category, concepts do not exist as completely separate entities.

Research has been conducted based on Rosch's theory of concepts. If her theory was applied to an abstract concept which does not have a prototype, for example intelligence, there would be no adequate way to define the concept. Due to this outcome it is important to note that this theory of prototypical concepts it not an all-or-nothing theory. Further more Rosch has made claims that concepts are bounded and can not appear as single entities. This view was argued by philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry A Fodor, who claims that concepts are in fact definitions. By definitions Fodor means that concepts are substitutable strings of symbols.

Linguistic Relativity

According to a paper by Eleanor Rosch linguistic relativity states that it is naive to think that by learning a new language one simple learns a new vocabulary for the same objects. Instead linguistics is used a s a mechanism to shape ideas and concepts. Linguistic theories imply that language imposes culture as well as a particular world view on the individual that speaks it. In Rosch's theory of linguistic relativity she claims that the basic unit of the English language are objects or nouns. Beyond this these objects are given substance through actions or verbs, both nouns and verbs exist in an objective form. Words within any language can be divided into classes based on the positions that they are able to occupy within a sentence. A Basic level of this class separation is Grammar. Gender is an example of class distinction in the French language.These classes are both considered structural, they do not infer any cognitive differences between languages. In contrast semantic form classes exist within the native speakers of a given language. Rosch has identified cryptotypes within form classes which act as the underlying categorization of the world. Through her research she has claimed that native speakers of the language should code form classes as categories. These semantically coded categories have been shown to have many positive effects of human memory. Another level on which variations between languages occur is that of the lexicon, or vocabulary of a language. There are overt difference in the way in which the world is coded, these differences are based on which aspects are relevant to the native speakers of a language. One example of lexical differences is between English and the language of the Eskimo, the Eskimo have three different words for the single word, snow, in English.

Publications

During her research Rosch has contributed numerous publications to the field of psychology. She has contributed works in the form of books, chapters within larger books as well as many journal articles. A great deal of her work is focused on the theory of categorization or natural categories. She has also provided research on prototype theory as well as other topics. Some of the books that Rosch has contributed to include: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cognition and Categorization and The Dynamics of Concepts and Categories: Implications for the Nature of Human Mind. She has produced numerous journal articles published in journals including: The Journal of Conscious studies, "The Journal of Experimental Psychology", "ETC", Cognitive Psychology" as well as many more.

When I am done improving and expanding this article about Eleanor Rosch it will include sections about natural categories as well as the prototype theory both of which Rosch was very influential in producing. The current article contains a section on publications by Rosch. When I am done editing the article this section will be placed at the bottom of the article, after categorization and prototype theory.

The first heading will be categorization. In this section I will provide an in depth focus on her lengthy works on categorization. Rosch focused a great deal on natural categories. In studies by Rosch and colleagues items which fall into presumed natural categories are easier to learn than items which fall into other domains. Another aspect of interest in Rosch’s studies which I will discuss in the article is the difference between natural and artificial categories.

The second heading will be Prototype theory. In this section I will explain what prototype theory is and how Eleanor Rosch was involved in the creation of the theory. An important aspect that Eleanor Rosch focuses on when discussing prototype theory is family resemblances. Family resemblances are the based on the number of features that category members share.