Robert Mark Nosofsky (born 1956) is a distinguished professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at

Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington, Indiana University, IU, or simply Indiana) is a public university, public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship university, flagship campus of Indiana University and, with ...

. He is best known for his

exemplar theory Exemplar theory is a proposal concerning the way humans categorize objects and ideas in psychology. It argues that individuals make category judgments by comparing new stimuli with instances already stored in memory. The instance stored in memory ...

, which has diverse applications in cognitive science and

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

. His research interest are categorization, recognition memory, math modeling, combining formal modeling and FMRI Studies. His research is in the development and testing of formal mathematical models of perceptual category learning and representation.

Life and education

He was born in U.S.A. He graduated with a

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

and

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

at the State University of New York in

Binghamton Binghamton () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, and serves as the county seat of Broome County. Surrounded by rolling hills, it lies in the state's Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the conflue ...

in 1978 and a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

1984.

Exemplar theory

The exemplar theory, which was proposed by Robert Nosofsky is different from the prototype theory, proposed by

Eleanor Rosch Eleanor Rosch (once known as Eleanor Rosch Heider;"Natural Categories", Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3, (May 1973), p. 328. born 1938) is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, s ...

, and the demarcator theory, proposed by Taraneh Javanbakht. According to the exemplar theory, the human

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by s ...

categories is based on the use of exemplars of concepts. The exemplar theory explains how the human beings learn and use these concept categories.Smith, E., Medin, D. (1999). The Exemplar View. Concepts: Core Readings, 207-209

Awards and honors

Robert Nosofsky received the first New Investigator Research Award of the Society of Mathematical Psychology (1987), APA's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (1993), and the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences (1995). He was elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the leading honorary society in the field, in 1998. In January, he accepted the editorship of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, one of the most prestigious theoretical-empirical journals in the field.

Works

* Nosofsky, R.M., Sanders, C., Meagher, B.J., & Douglas, B.J (2017). Toward the development of a feature-space representation for a complex natural category domain. Behavior Research Methods * Nosofsky, R.M., Sanders, C., Gerdom, A., Douglas, B., & McDaniel, M. (2017). On learning natural science categories that violate the family-resemblance principle. Psychological Science, 28, 104-114 * Nosofsky, R.M., & Donkin, C. (2016). Qualitative contrast between knowledge-limited mixed-state and variable-resources models of visual change detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 1507-1525 * Nosofsky, R. M. (2016). An exemplar-retrieval model of short-term memory search: Linking categorization and probe recognition. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 65, 47-84

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nosofsky, Robert American cognitive psychologists Indiana University people New York University alumni Harvard University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 1950s births

Life and education

Exemplar theory

Awards and honors

Works

See also

Notes