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Dr. Ed 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

Selected publications:

Wisniewski, E. J., & Murphy, G. L. (2005).  Frequency of Relation Type as a Determinant of Conceptual Combination: A Reanalysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 169-174.

Middleton, E. L, Wisniewski, E. J., Trindel, K. A., & Imai, M. (2004).  Separating the chaff from the oats: Evidence for a conceptual distinction between count noun and mass noun aggregates.  Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 371-394.

Wisniewski, E. J. (2000). Similarity, alignment, and conceptual combination: Reply to Estes and Glucksberg. Memory & Cognition, 28, 35-38.

Wisniewski, E. J. (1999). The copying machine metaphor. In D. L. Medin (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 39, pp. 129-162). New York: Academic Press.

Wisniewski, E. J., & Bassok, M. (1999). What makes a man similar to a tie? Stimulus compatibility with comparison and integration, Cognitive Psychology, 39, 208-238.