Adults and infants organize and consolidate sensory information into categories (e.g. "trees", "chairs", "dogs", "automobiles", "clouds" etc.). Cognitive averaging of the individual exemplars within a category creates a "prototype", or central representative of the category. Thus after seeing several exemplars from a category both adults and infants respond to an averaged representation of those exemplars as if it were familiar. That is, they show evidence of forming mental prototypes, on which they then rely to recognize new instances of the category.