Eleanor Rosch

Eleanor Rosch (born 1938) is an American cognitive psychologist and professor in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, who earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 1969. Her research on categorization showed that people classify an everyday object less by abstract definitions than by how well it matches what they regard as the best example of a category, so that a robin is a better prototype of a bird than a chicken or an ostrich; this work underlies prototype theory and led her to describe a hierarchy of basic, superordinate and subordinate categories. She has also studied cross-cultural, Eastern and religious psychology, and her most recent research concerns wisdom awareness and its implications for cognitive science.