Hey - #8 regarding "consulting the prototype chain if the value is an object" is something of an oversimplification, and slightly incorrect. The prototype chain is more or less always consulted because that is the only way to evaluate the property on a child scope.

What is happening in the first example is that the ng-bind directive is creating a new entry on the child scope, called "user", which overwrites the reference to the property defined in the parent scope. When you ng-bind an attribute of an object, your child scope is not changing the reference to the original object, so both scopes will show updates.

Example fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/02f4o7u9/1/