Chair & Table Sets

Prototype Theory is a mode of graded categorization in Cognitive Science, where some members of a category are more central than others. For example, when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more frequently cited than, say, stool. more...

Home
Bedding
Furniture
Bedroom Furniture
Children's Furniture
Bedroom Furniture
Benches
Bookcases
Chair & Table Sets
Chairs
Desks
Other Children's Furniture
Shelves
Stools
Storage Units
Tables
Toy Boxes
Dining Room Furniture
Kitchen Furniture
Living Room, General...
Office
Home Decor
Miscellaneous
Patio & Grilling

Prototype theory also plays a central role in Linguistics, as part of the mapping from phonological structure to semantics.

As formulated in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch and others, prototype theory was a radical departure from traditional necessary and sufficient conditions as in Aristotelian logic, which led to set-theoretic approaches of extensional or intensional semantics. Thus instead of a definition based model - e.g. a bird may be defined as elements with the features , and , prototype theory would consider a category like bird as consisting of different elements which have unequal status - e.g. a robin is more prototypical of a bird than, say a penguin. This leads to a graded notion of categories, which is a central notion in many models of cognitive science and cognitive semantics, e.g. in the work of George Lakoff (Women, fire and dangerous things, 1987) or Ronald Langacker (Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1/2 1987/1991).

The term prototype has been defined in Eleanor Rosch's study "Natural Categories" (1973) and was first defined as a stimulus, which takes a salient position in the formation of a category as it is the first stimulus to be associated with that category. Later, she redefined it as the most central member of a category.

Cognitive Representation of Semantic Categories

In her 1975 paper, Cognitive Representation of Semantic Categories (J Experimental Psychology v. 104:192-233), Eleanor Rosch asked 200 American college students to rank, on a scale of 1 to 7, whether they regarded the following items as a good example of the category furniture. The resulting ranks are as follows:

1 chair

1 sofa

3 couch

3 table

5 easy chair

6 dresser

6 rocking chair

8 coffee table

9 rocker

10 love seat

11 chest of drawers

12 desk

13 bed

...

22 bookcase

27 cabinet

29 bench

31 lamp

32 stool

35 piano

41 mirror

42 tv

44 shelf

45 rug

46 pillow

47 wastebasket

49 sewing machine

50 stove

54 refrigerator

60 telephone

While one may differ from this list in terms of cultural specifics, the point is that such a graded categorization is likely to be present in all cultures. Further evidence that some members of a category are more privileged than others came from experiments involving:

1. Response Times: in which queries involving a prototypical members (e.g. is a robin a bird) elicited faster response times than for non-prototypical members.

2. Priming: When primed with the higher-level (superordinate) category, subjects were faster in identifying if two words are the same. Thus, after flashing furniture, the equivalence of chair-chair is detected more rapidly than stove-stove.

3. Exemplars: When asked to name a few exemplars, the more prototypical items came up more frequently.

Subsequent to Rosch's work, prototype effects have been investigated widely in areas such as colour cognition (Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, 1969), and also for more abstract notions. Subjects may be asked, e.g. "to what degree is this narrative an instance of telling a lie?" . Similarly work has been done on actions (verbs like look, kill, speak, walk ), adjectives like "tall" , etc.

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