Eleanor Rosch

Eleanor Rosch is a professor of psychology at The University of California, Berkeley. She is primarily known for her work on categorization as it relates to cognitive psychology. In a series of experiments in the 1970's, Rosch argued that when people label an everyday object or experience, they rely less on abstract definitions than on a comparison with what they regard as the best representative of that catergory designated by that word. She also created prototype theory in linguistics. She was influenced by George Lakoff and incorporated eastern thought such as Buddhism into her work. During these experiements she worked with the Dani tribe of New Guinea, where she showed that although they lacked words for colors except for black and white, they could still distingusish between the wordless colors. She concluded that people in different cultures tend to catergorize objects in similar ways. She argued that basic objects have a psychological import that transcends cultural differences and shapes people's mental respresentations of them.

Partial bibliography
Rosch, E. Varela, F. & Thompson, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Rosch, E. (1983). Prototype classification and logical classification: The two systems. In Scholnick, E. New Trends in Cognitive Representation: Challenges to Piaget's Theory; 73—86. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mervis, C. & Rosch E. (1981). Categorization of Natural Objects. Annual Review of Psychology, 32: 89-113. Annual Reviews, Inc.

Rosch, E. & Lloyd, B. (Eds.)(1978). Cognition and Categorization. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Rosch, E. (1977). Human Categorization. Advances in Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1: 1-72, Neil Warren ed. Academic Press Ltd.

Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representation of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 104:573-605.

Rosch, E. (1973). Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 4: 328—350.