convey the intended message. Children also learn basic level concepts first and then the other levels. Most of the concepts people use in thinking are neither clear nor unambiguous. They are fuzzy.
They overlap one another and are often poorly defined. For example, under which category would you put a small stool? Would you put it under the category of ‘chair’ or under the category of ‘table’? The answer to these questions is that we construct a model or prototype .
A prototype is the best representative member of the category. Eleanor Rosch argues that in considering how people think about concepts, prototypes are often involved in real life. In prototype matching, people decide whether an item is a member of a category by comparing it with the most typical item(s) of the category. Therefore, in the above example of the stool, you would try to compare it with a standard study chair (if you consider it as the typical example of a chair) and a small study table (if you consider it as the typical example of a table) and then match the properties of the stool with these two concepts.
If it matches with a chair you would put it under the Our beliefs, values, and social practices influence the way we think. In a study conducted on American and Asian students, pictures like the following (underwater scene) were used. The subjects were asked to have a look at the scene for a brief period and then were asked to describe what they saw. The American students focussed on the biggest, brightest, and most outstanding features (for example, “the large fish swimming to the right”).
In contrast, the Japanese students focussed on the background (for example, “the bottom was rocky” or “the water was green”). Based on these kinds of findings, researchers concluded that Americans usually analyse each .