Throughout her work Rosch has conducted extensive research focusing on a range of topics, including semantic categorization, mental representation of concepts, and linguistics.

[5] Her research interests include cognition, concepts, causality, thinking, memory, and cross-cultural, and Eastern and religious psychology.

Rosch was born in New York City, the daughter of an English teacher from England and a mother who was a Russian refugee.

Rosch delivered a paradigm-changing[7] doctoral thesis at Harvard about category formation, under the direction of Roger Brown.

[10] 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.