Rosch was born in New York City, the daughter of an English teacher from England and a mother who was a Russian refugee. She completed an undergraduate philosophy thesis at Reed College on Wittgenstein, who she said "cured her of studying philosophy." After school, she served as a social worker in Portland for several years, returning later to Harvard to study clinical psychology at the then-Department of Social Relations. Rosch delivered a paradigm-changing doctoral thesis at Harvard about category formation, under the direction of Roger Brown. After a short stint at Brown University and Connecticut College, Rosch joined the Department of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley in 1971.
Research
From field experiments Rosch conducted in the 1970s with the Dani people of Papua New Guinea, she concluded that when categorizing an everyday object or experience, people rely less on abstract definitions of categories than on a comparison of the given object or experience with what they deem to be the object or experience best representing a category. Although the Dani lack words for all the English colors, Rosch showed that they could still categorize objects by colors for which they had no words. She argued that basic objects have a psychological import that transcends cultural differences and shapes how such objects are mentally represented. She concluded that people in different cultures tend to categorize objects by using prototypes, although the prototypes of particular categories may vary. Rosch contributed to multiple scholarly works of taxonomic analysis of objects based on these prototype and subordinate terms. She inferred that overuse of subordinate terms could be attributed to the attitude of snobbery and elitism. Her work has been often referenced by that of computer vision and deep learning researcher Aude Oliva, who has built upon Rosch's object classifications to teach computers to recognize basic scenes instantly interpreted by humans.
1973, "On the Internal Structure of Perceptual and Semantic Categories." In T. Moore, Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, New York: Academic Press, 1973.
1974, Linguistic relativity. In: E. Silverstein Human Communication: Theoretical Perspectives, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
1977, "Human Categorization" in Warren, Neil, ed., Advances in Cross-Cultural Psychology 1: 1-72. Academic Press.
1983, "Prototype classification and logical classification: The two systems" in Scholnick, E., New Trends in Cognitive Representation: Challenges to Piaget's Theory''. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 73-86
Papers
Categorization and prototype theory
1975, "Cognitive representation of semantic categories," ''Journal of Experimental Psychology 104: 192-233.
