Exemplar models and prototype effects in similarity-based categorization

I. P. L. McLaren, C. H. Bennett, T. Guttman-Nahir, K. Kim, and N. J. MacKintosh (1995) have argued that exemplar models have problems explaining their finding that people often respond more accurately to the prototypes from certain categories than to other exemplars. The author reviews McLaren et al.'s arguments and shows that two exemplar theories, the generalized context model with Euclidean distances and the weighted ratio model, can account for the prototype-superiority effects in their experiments. The author concludes that McLaren et al.'s results support, rather than challenge, exemplar models of categorization.