Typicality (source code)

= Typicality

<Typicality> is how representative an example seems of a category. A robin may be judged a more typical bird than a penguin, although both are birds. Such judgments can reflect familiarity, similarity to other members or the purposes for which a category is used; they are not the same measurement as a yes-or-no judgment of <category membership>.

Even a sharply defined mathematical category can produce graded psychological judgments. People can regard some <odd integers> as better examples than others, despite every <odd integer> satisfying the same membership rule. <Sharon Lee Armstrong> and colleagues used such cases to show that graded <typicality> does not, by itself, establish that a concept lacks a definition.<What some concepts might not be by Sharon Lee Armstrong and others>[Experiments on well-defined concepts and discussion of typicality versus membership]{ref}