Shoben

Faculty

Edward J. Shoben, Ph.D.

Professor

Program:

Experimental

Email:

ed.shoben@unlv.edu

Phone:

(702) 895-0193

Accepting Graduate Students 2008-2009: NO

Research Interests

Edward J. Shoben, who has spent most of the past 12 years in university administration, has concentrated his research in language and memory. Specifically, his earlier work dealt with categorization and its flexibility. His more recent work has concentrated on judgments of relative magnitude, "rabbits are larger than mice," and the role that the categorization of "mice" as "small" plays in these judgments. His work on language has dealt with the comprehension of noun-noun compounds such as why people, for example, readily comprehend the phrase "mountain stream," but take longer to comprehend the more frequent "mountain range." Together with Christina Gagne, Professor Shoben has developed a model (CARIN -- Competition Among Relations In Nominals) whose primary assumption is that people know not only the meaning of a concept, but how it is used. Thus, for example, "mountain" is often used to indicate location (mountain cabin, mountain forest, mountain dog, etc.), all of which can be understood as "An X in the mountains." "An X made up of mountains" as in "mountain range" is much rarer. His Ph.D (1974) is from Stanford University in cognitive psychology.

Selected Publications

Gagne, C. L. & Shoben, E. J. (2002). Priming relations in ambiguous noun-noun combinations. Memory & Cognition, 30, 637-646.

Cech, C. G. & Shoben, E. J. (2001). Categorization processes in mental comparisons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 27, 800-816.

Sailor, K. M. & Shoben, E. J. (2000). The role of part-whole information in reasoning about relative size. Memory & Cognition, 28, 585-596.

Shoben, E. J. & Wilson, T. L. (1998). Categorization in Comparative Judgment. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 94-111.

Gagne, C. L. & Shoben, E. J. (1997). The influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of non-predicating conceptual combinations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 71-87.

Medin, D. L. & Shoben, E. J. (1988). Context and structure in conceptual combination. Cognitive Psychology, 20, 158-190.

Roth, E. M., & Shoben, E. J. (1983). The effect of context on the structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 346-378.