Exemplar Theory

Exemplar theory is a proposal in psychology about how humans categorize objects and ideas, holding that people make category judgments by comparing a new stimulus with instances, called exemplars, already stored in memory. Under this account, a person builds a category such as bird by remembering specific birds they have encountered, sparrows, robins, ostriches, penguins and so on, and a new stimulus is classified as a bird when it resembles these remembered examples closely enough. A stated advantage of exemplar theory is that it explains categorization through direct comparison with already encountered memories rather than through an additional abstract summary representation of the category, offering a simpler account of concept learning than theories built on abstract rule formation.