Where does prototype collide?

In Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory of categories, a prototype is the clearest, most representative member of a category, the example that comes to mind first and against which other members are judged. Rosch (1975) had people rate how good an example each item was of its category and found graded structure: a robin is a better bird than a penguin, and people verify membership faster for the good examples. The referent is a mental representation of a category's center, held by a perceiver, and the unit is a summary of what a category's members tend to be like. It differs from the other meanings because nothing is being built and no object inherits from another; the prototype is remembered and rated, not made.[1]

Unit

A category's most representative member, as held in the mind

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Typicality ratings and category-verification reaction times

In engineering and product design, a prototype is an early, deliberately incomplete version of a product, built to test an idea and learn before committing to it. Camburn and colleagues (2017), reviewing prototyping methods, describe it as an approximation of the product along one or more dimensions, made to answer a specific question about form, function, or feasibility. The referent is a physical or digital artifact under development, and its value lies in what its makers learn by building and testing it, not in representing anything. This meaning shares only the word with Rosch's: here the prototype is constructed, and it is meant to be revised or thrown away, not recalled.[2]

Unit

An early, testable version of a product under development

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not scored on a scale; judged by the questions a build-and-test cycle answers

In prototype-based programming, a prototype is an existing object that other objects inherit behaviour from directly, with no class standing between them. Lieberman (1986) introduced the idea for object-oriented languages: a new object delegates to a prototype, and shared behaviour lives in that prototype rather than in a class definition, an approach that shapes languages such as Self and JavaScript. The referent is a runtime object in a program, and the relation is delegation, one object standing in for another's defaults. It differs from the category meaning because the prototype here is a concrete object with methods, not a mental summary, and from the engineering meaning because nothing is built to be tested and discarded.[3]

Unit

A runtime object that supplies inherited behaviour to others

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not a measured quantity; a structural delegation relation between objects in code

In self-categorization theory, a group prototype is the position, real or imagined, that best captures what an in-group has in common and what sets it apart from a relevant out-group. Hogg (2001), developing the idea for leadership, describes the prototype as a fuzzy set of attributes that members are judged against; the most prototypical member is seen as the most representative and tends to be granted influence. The referent is a shared, context-dependent representation of a social group, not a taxonomic category, and it shifts as the comparison out-group changes. It shares the meaning of a representative center with Rosch's category prototype, but the thing being centred is a group defined by contrast, and prototypicality here carries consequences for status and leadership that a robin's typicality does not.[4]

Unit

A group's defining position, relative to a contrasting out-group

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Ratings of members' and positions' prototypicality within a group