ABSTRACT
Rosch (1973, 1977) has argued persuasively that color categories as well as other natural categories are not logical bounded entities in which all instances that possess a small set of critical features have equal status as category members. Rather, she maintains that color categories are internally structured into a prototype or best example with nonprototype members ordered from good to poor in terms of their similarity to the prototype. In 1975 Rosch published a series of experiments (Rosch, 1975a) designed to determine whether this prototype structure is reflected in the mental representation of color categories. She explored the structure of mental color codes using a priming paradigm in which subjects judged whether pairs of color chips were physically identical. On priming trials subjects were given the name of the appropriate color category prior to the presentation of the test pair. She reasoned that a prime can only facilitate a judgment when it activates a mental code which contains information needed to make the match. If the mental code generated to the category name corresponds to the prototype of the category, then judgments involving good members of the category (those similar to the prototype) should be facilitated more than judgments which involve poor examples of a category. In fact, it was found that for same judgments, responses to good pairs were facilitated and responses to poor pairs inhibited when the prime was presented prior to the test pair. A replication of this basic finding is presented in Fig. 7.1. These effects were eliminated when the prime was presented simultaneously with the test pair. Thus, Rosch concluded that in response to the category name subjects generated a representation of the category prototype that contained more information in common with good than with poor members of the category. Because the prime was only effective when presented prior to the test pair, she argued that information contained in the category prototype facilitated the encoding of good members of the category rather than a later decision process.
