It is a fact of experience from the study of higher type computability that a wide range of approaches to defining a class of (hereditarily) total functionals over N leads in practice to a relatively small handful of distinct type structures. Among these are the type structure C of Kleene-Kreisel continuous functionals, its effective substructure Ceff, and the type structure HEO of the hereditarily effective operations. However, the proofs of the relevant equivalences are often non-trivial, and it is not immediately clear why these particular type structures should arise so ubiquitously.
In this talk we present some new results which go some way towards explaining this phenomenon. Our results show that a large class of extensional collapse constructions always give rise to C, Ceff or HEO (as appropriate). We obtain versions of our results for both the “standard” and “modified” extensional collapse constructions. The proofs make essential use of a technique due to Normann.
Many new results, as well as some previously known ones, can be obtained as instances of our theorems, but more importantly, the proofs apply uniformly to a whole family of constructions, and provide strong evidence that the above three type structures are highly canonical mathematical objects.