Concepts promote a cognitive economy by partitioning the world into classes. Concepts allow the mind to substantially reduce the amount of information to be remembered and processed. A concept is represented through a prototype which expresses its most significant properties. A prototype has cultural roots. Membership of an individual in a category is then determined by the perceived distance of resemblance of the individual to the prototype of the category.
Superordinate categories are more abstract and more comprehensive.
Subordinate categories are less abstract and less comprehensive. Categories are related in a hierarchical organization of language to describe the world. Categories occur in systems, and such systems include contrasting categories. At the basic level categories are maximally distinct, i.e. they maximize perceived similarity among category members and minimize perceived similarities across contrasting categories. Cue validity is the conditional probability that an object falls in a particular category given a specific feature.