It argues that individuals make category judgments by comparing new stimuli with instances already stored in memory.
[1] Various versions of the exemplar theory have led to a simplification of thought concerning concept learning, because they suggest that people use already-encountered memories to determine categorization, rather than creating an additional abstract summary of representations.
They also both rely on the same general cognitive process: we experience a new stimulus, a concept in memory is triggered, we make a judgment of resemblance, and draw a categorization conclusion.
Exemplars can make sense of variable categories—those with less distinguished characteristics—such as "games", much more so than prototypes, which rely on typical characteristics to determine membership.
The categorization process for identifying which type of animal a dog is can be used to provide an example for the usage of exemplar theory.
[4] Another study though, shows evidence that the exemplar-based approach is more accurate as you become more familiar with a category because knowledge of the members is greater than that that can be represented by a single prototype.
[9] For example, when one is asked to generate a list of fruits, apples, oranges and bananas will often come to mind first as they are considered more typical.
[10] It has been suggested by researchers that increased frequency of the presentation of a stimulus will positively influence the typicality of an exemplar.
[11] For example, a radiologist must classify a suspicious spot on an X-ray either as a tumor or as natural tissue variation.
[12] The publicity from the incidents of 9/11 caused an increase in the rated typicality of airplane from five hours to one month after the terrorist attack.
These findings suggest that because of the amount of media coverage surrounding the events of 9/11, the word airplane was so frequently used that it became as common as a typical vehicle.
In one of their experiments, it was found that participants estimated the frequency of occurrence of different types of events by finding several exemplars to base their approximation on.
For example, when participants were asked if there are more words in the English language that either start with "k" or have "k" as the third letter, most chose the first option (even though this is incorrect).
)[9] In categorization studies, participants sometimes conclude that a new stimuli is not a member of a certain category by finding a counter exemplar.