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Concepts and Prototypes

Concepts and Prototypes

The human nervous system handles vast amounts of information by translating sensory stimuli into neural impulses, which the brain processes, creating thoughts expressed through language or stored as memories. The brain also synthesizes information from emotions and memories, which significantly influence thoughts and behaviors. This intricate process creates a comprehensive mental picture.
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The representative heuristic describes a biased way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something. For example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

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The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) was first proposed by Susan Fiske and her colleagues (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002; see also Fiske, 2012 and Fiske, 2017). The SCM specifies that when someone encounters a new group, they will stereotype them based on two metrics: warmth—or that group’s perceived intent, and how likely they are to provide help or inflict harm—and competence—or their ability to carry out that objective. Depending on the warmth-competence...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 7, 2025

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

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Published on: February 8, 2019

Human generalization of internal representations through prototype learning with goal-directed attention.

Warren Woodrich Pettine¹, Dhruva Venkita Raman², A David Redish³

¹Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.

Nature Human Behaviour

|March 9, 2023

Summary

Humans simplify complex information using internal representations. Our study shows people often use both goal-directed attention to features and prototype-based representations for generalization.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Computational Neuroscience
Psychology

Background:

The external world presents complex, feature-rich information.
Humans create simplified internal representations for generalization to novel situations.
Existing theories propose decision boundaries or prototype/exemplar distances for representation.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop theoretical models combining discriminative and distance components for internal representations.
To investigate how humans utilize goal-oriented discriminative attention and prototype/exemplar representations.
To test these models using latent-state learning tasks.

Main Methods:

Developed theoretical models integrating discriminative and distance-based components.
Designed three latent-state learning tasks to assess human representation strategies.
Analyzed participant behavior in relation to goal-relevant features and prototype covariances.

Main Results:

A majority of participants integrated goal-relevant discriminative features with prototype feature covariances.
A minority of participants focused solely on discriminative features.
Participant behavior was accurately modeled by combining prototype representations and discriminative attention.

Conclusions:

Human internal representations leverage both discriminative and prototype-based mechanisms.
Goal-oriented attention plays a crucial role in selecting relevant features.
A hybrid model effectively captures diverse human strategies for simplifying complex information.