category

Meaning: A category (or concept) is a mental grouping of items judged to be alike. It lets you classify a new item quickly and infer properties you have not observed, such as assuming an unfamiliar bird can fly. Three accounts of how categories are represented appear in cognition. The classical view uses defining features, which fits many natural categories poorly because their boundaries are fuzzy. The prototype model compares an item with an abstracted best or average example. The exemplar model compares it with specific remembered members. In sociology, a social category (gender, race, age group) is a group defined by a shared attribute, which feeds social identity and in-group versus out-group thinking.

On the MCAT: A typical passage has participants decide whether items belong to a category, such as "Is a penguin a bird?", and records reaction time or accuracy. Typical members (robin) are usually verified faster and more accurately than atypical ones (penguin), which supports prototype effects. Expect questions that ask you to predict that pattern, to name the model a result supports, or to link categorizing people to stereotypes and in-group favoritism.

Common confusion: A category is not the same as a schema. A category is the grouping itself, while a schema is the organized knowledge and expectations built around it. Also, a prototype is an abstracted average that need not be a real case, whereas an exemplar is a real stored instance.