Explain the concept and application of isolated scopes in directives.
Instruction: Describe what isolated scopes are in AngularJS directives and when to use them.
Context: Candidates will need to show understanding of scope isolation in directives, its importance, and its application for creating reusable components.
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An isolate scope does not inherit arbitrary parent properties through the normal scope prototype chain. It gives a reusable directive an explicit interface. In AngularJS 1.5+, the component API creates an isolate scope and binds declared inputs/outputs to its controller.
The common binding modes are @ for interpolated text, < for a one-way input, = for a two-way connection to an assignable expression, and & for invoking a parent expression...