Edward J. Wisniewski

At a general level, my research focuses on people's mental representations or concepts of everyday things. It addresses a number of interrelated issues associated with people's concepts. First, I am especially interested in how people combine familiar concepts to produce new ones. People frequently use these novel combinations to express new ideas, to refer to new situations, and so on. There has been much interest in novel noun-noun and adjective-noun combinations. Recent examples include: ostrich steak (a steak made out of ostrich meat), zebra mussel (a mussel with zebra-like stripes), and purple potato (a type of potato that is purple). My work focuses on the basic types of strategies that people use to combine concepts as well as the cognitive processes involved. I have developed a two-process account of how people combine concepts. Associate Editor, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

There are 3 included publications by Edward J. Wisniewski :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Complex Data Produce Better Characters 2004 2643 Abstract: Two studies were conducted to explore the use of complex data in character description and hybrid identification. In order to determine if complex data allow the production of better characters, eight groups of plant systematists were given...
Conceptual Combination and Language in Schizophrenia 2010 901 Unconventional discourse is a noteworthy feature in schizophrenia. Semantic priming methodology underlies the influential theory that abnormalities accessing semantic representations — through spreading activation within a network — are the core mech...
Familiarity and Plausibility in Conceptual Combination: Reply to Gagné and Spalding (2006) 2006 1874 Wisniewski and Murphy (2005) suggested that the apparent effects of relation frequency in Gagné and Shoben's (1997) conceptual combination experiments could be explained by differences between the familiarity and plausibility of their stimuli (noun-n...