PS251 - Advantages of Family Resemblance View

Can explain typicality effects

• People find it easier to recognise or categorise typical members of a category and are faster to do so, which aligns with the idea that typical items share more salient features with the average representation.

• In contrast, atypical members require more cognitive effort to categorise because they match fewer of the weighted features.

• For example, people are quicker to identify a chair as a piece of furniture than a piano, even though both belong to the same category.

Avoids assumption that all concepts must have defining, all-or-nothing boundaries

• Many categories do not have clear necessary and sufficient conditions. People may struggle to specify what makes something a “game, or a “bird,” yet they still use these categories effectively.

• Family resemblance model explains this by proposing that there are no essential features. Instead, attributes have different weights depending on how salient or diagnostic they are.

• For instance, most violins are made of wood, but an electric blue metal violin is still recognised as a violin because it shares the most important functional and perceptual attributes of the category.

Cognitively efficient

• As it does not require individuals to store rigid rules for every category. Instead, people rely on similarity to a prototype, an abstracted mental representation formed from experience.

• This allows quick categorisation without conscious analysis of features. While this model may not apply perfectly to all categories (such as mathematical or rule-based ones), it provides a more realistic account of how people structure and use concepts in the natural world.

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