In systematics, an ideotype is a specimen identified as belonging to a specific taxon by the author of that taxon, but collected from somewhere other than the type locality.
[1] It literally means 'a form denoting an idea'.
According to Donald, an ideotype is a biological model which is expected to perform or behave in a particular manner within a defined environment: "a crop ideotype is a plant model, which is expected to yield a greater quantity or quality of grain, oil or other useful product when developed as a cultivar."
Donald and Hamblin (1976) proposed the concepts of isolation, competition and crop ideotypes.
[2] The term is also used in cognitive science and cognitive psychology, where Ronaldo Vigo (2011, 2013, 2014) introduced it to refer to a type of concept metarepresentation that is a compound memory trace consisting of the structural information detected by humans in categorical stimuli.