Jennifer A Stolz

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Department of Psychology

Across four studies participants ( N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo ), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8 ), and no titles. Randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles increased the perceived profoundness of comput...

Navigating social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has formed to meet the unique challenges that emerge for highly social species. Bullshitting, communication characterised by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for truth, is ubiquitous within human societies. Ac...

The present work (N = 1906 U.S. residents) investigates the extent to which peoples' evaluations of actions can be biased by the strategic use of euphemistic (agreeable) and dysphemistic (disagreeable) terms. We find that participants' evaluations of actions are made more favorable by replacing a disagreeable term (e.g., torture) with a semanticall...

The present work (N = 1,906 U.S. residents) investigates the extent to which peoples’ evaluations of actions can be biased by the strategic use of euphemistic (agreeable) and dysphemistic (disagreeable) terms. We find that participants’ evaluations of actions are made more favorable by replacing a disagreeable term (e.g., torture) with a semantical...

The ability to navigate social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has at least partially formed to best meet the unique cognitive challenges that emerge in a highly social species. Bullshitting, a style of communication characterised by an intent to be convincing or impressive without...

Across two experiments (N=799) we demonstrate that people’s use of quantitative information (e.g., base-rates) when making a judgment varies as the causal link of qualitative information (e.g., stereotypes) changes. That is, when a clear causal link for stereotypes is provided, people make judgments that are far more in line with them. When the cau...

Across two experiments (N=799) we demonstrate that people’s use of quantitative information (e.g., base-rates) when making a judgment varies as the causal link of qualitative information (e.g., stereotypes) changes. That is, when a clear causal link for stereotypes is provided, people make judgments that are far more in line with them. When the cau...

Across four studies participants (N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8), and no titles. Randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles increased the perceived profoundness of computer-...

Doublespeak refers to the strategic use of language to distort, obscure, or misrepresent events or information. It avoids outright falsehoods while simultaneously stretching the truth in order to impart the reality most favourable to a speaker. Using real-world examples of doublespeak, the current study (N = 1768) investigates whether peoples’ eval...

Using a variety of different and often provocative examples, this chapter illustrates how evolutionary theory can be used to think about things in new and sometimes even counterintuitive ways. Examples include how semen sampling may be an evolved mate-choice mechanism, why pubic hair removal may promote pedophilia, why we owe our existence to the m...

Across four studies participants (N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8), and no titles. Randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles increased the perceived profoundness of computer...

Previous research has demonstrated a link between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs. On this basis, we hypothesized that participants who displayed greater degrees of illusory pattern perception would also be more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. We find support for this prediction across thre...

Most research on the topic of duration estimation has examined the mechanisms underlying estimation of durations that are demarcated by experimental stimuli. It is not clear whether the estimation of durations that are instead defined by our own mental processes (e.g., response times) is underlain by the same mechanisms. Across five experiments, we...

The capacity to experience an orgasm evolved to promote high-frequency sex in species with low reproductive rates. Growing evidence shows that orgasms also have a variety of other reproductive consequences. Based on a distinction between orgasm frequency and orgasm intensity, there is emerging evidence in humans that orgasms function to promote and...

The standard view in cognition is that the identification of visually presented words, up to and including semantic activation, is automatic in various senses. The perspective favored here is that various kinds of attention are intimately involved in the identification of words. Some forms of attention are necessary, whereas others (i.e., executive...

Attentional biases to threat are thought to play a central role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Various measures have been developed to index these biases; unfortunately, the psychometric properties of response time measures of attentional bias have not been thoroughly evaluated, and the reliability of those that have been...

Previous research shows that performance on pop-out search tasks is facilitated when the target and distractors repeat across trials compared to when they switch. This phenomenon has been shown for many different types of visual stimuli. We tested whether the effect would extend beyond visual stimuli to the auditory modality. Using a temporal searc...

A divide exists in the creativity literature as to whether relatively more or less executive processing is beneficial to creative thinking. To explore this issue, we employ an individual differences perspective informed by dual-process theories (DPTs) in which it is assumed that people vary in the extent to which they rely on autonomous (Type 1) or...

The question of whether words can be identified without spatial attention has been a topic of considerable interest over the last five and a half decades, but the literature has yielded mixed conclusions. The present experiments manipulated the proportion of valid trials (the proportion of trials in which a cue appeared in the same location as the...

Two experiments combined a spatial cueing manipulation (valid vs. invalid spatial cues) with a stimulus repetition manipulation (repeated vs. nonrepeated) in order to assess the hypothesis that familiar items need less spatial attention than less familiar ones. The magnitude of the effect of cueing on reading aloud time for items that were repeated...

Two lexical decision experiments examined the joint effects of stimulus quality, semantic context, and cue-target associative strength when all factors were intermixed in a block of trials. Both experiments found a three-way interaction. Semantic context and stimulus quality interacted when associative strength between cue-target pairs was strong,...

One major idea about spatial attention is that it serves to modulate crosstalk between features during reading. Two reading aloud experiments are reported in which a cue-validity manipulation was combined with manipulations that are thought to increase the likelihood of feature-level crosstalk: interletter spacing and the presence or absence of irr...

Repetition priming is one of the most robust phenomena in cognitive psychology, but participants vary substantially on the amount of priming that they produce. The current experiments assessed the reliability of repetition priming within individuals. The results suggest that observed differences in the size of the repetition priming effect across p...

It is well known that the difference in performance between valid and invalid trials in the covert orienting paradigm (i.e., the cueing effect) increases as the proportion of valid trials increases. This proportion valid effect is widely assumed to reflect "strategic" control over the distribution of attention. In the present experiments we determi...

Chica and Bartolemeo (Unconscious strategies? Commentary on Risko and Stolz (2010): The proportion valid effect in covert orienting: Strategic control or implicit learning? Consciousness and Cognition,19, 443-444.) agree that our results (Risko, E. F., & Stolz, J. A. (2010). The proportion valid effect in covert orienting: Strategic control or impl...

Two experiments investigated the role that mental set plays in reading aloud using the task choice procedure developed by Besner and Care [Besner, D., & Care, S. (2003). A paradigm for exploring what the mind does while deciding what it should do. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57, 311-320]. Subjects were presented with a word, and as...

In four experiments, we investigated the effect of deleting specific features of letters on letter and word recognition in the context of reading aloud. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the relative importance of vertices versus midsegments in letter recognition. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the relative importance of vertices versus midsegments in word...

Much recent work has investigated participants’ ability to switch between simple cognitive tasks. However, little research examines how performing an emotionally relevant task affects one’s ability to switch tasks. Understanding how emotion affects the task-switching process may help elucidate the role of emotion in executive control. Across two ex...

Proportion compatible manipulations are often used to index strategic processes in selective attention tasks. Here, a subtle confound in proportion compatible manipulations is considered. Specifically, as the proportion of compatible trials increases, the ratio of complete repetitions and complete alternations to partial repetitions increases on co...

Contrary to the received view that reading aloud reflects processes that are "automatic," recent evidence suggests that some of these processes require a form of attention. This issue was investigated further by examining the effect of a prior presentation of exception words (words whose spelling-sound translation are atypical, such as pint as comp...

An increase in the proportion of spatially cued trials in the context of the covert orienting paradigm increases the magnitude of the cuing effect. This proportion cued effect is widely interpreted to reflect a form of control. Specifically, it is argued that participants strategically allocate attention as a function of the utility of the spatial...

We used the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm to examine the roles of semantics, phonology, and orthography on report from rapidly presented 5-item word lists. Semantic primes in positions 1 and 3 in the list preceded homographic homophones, homographic heterophones, and heterographic homophones as critical targets in positions 2 and 4. All codes...

The influence of facial affect on the perception of temporal order was examined in the context of the temporal order judgment (TOJ) paradigm. Two schematic faces were presented either simultaneously, or separated by varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; -100 ms, -34 ms, -17 ms, 17 ms, 34 ms, 100 ms), and participants had to judge which face ap...

The Simon effect refers to the observation that subjects identify targets (e.g., colors) faster when the irrelevant spatial location of the target corresponds to the location of the response key. Theoretical accounts of the Simon effect typically explain performance in terms of automatic and controlled processes. Furthermore, the relative contribut...

Semantic and morphological contexts were manipulated jointly with stimulus quality under conditions where there were few related prime-target pairs (i.e., low relatedness proportion) in a lexical decision experiment. Additive effects of semantic context and stimulus quality on RT were observed, replicating previous work. In contrast, morphological...

In experiments on semantic priming, participants vary substantially in the absolute magnitude of priming they produce. Are these individual differences systematic or do they arise from random processes, and does the answer carry theoretical implications? To find out, we examined split‐half and test–retest reliability of semantic priming in a series...

Visual word recognition is commonly argued to be automatic in the sense that it is obligatory and ballistic. The present experiments combined Stroop and visual search paradigms to provide a novel test of this claim. An array of three, five, or seven words including one colored target (a word in Experiments 1 and 2, a bar in Experiment 3) was presen...

In experiments on semantic priming, participants vary substantially in the absolute magnitude of priming they produce. Are these individual differences systematic or do they arise from random processes, and does the answer carry theoretical implications? To find out, we examined split‐half and test–retest reliability of semantic priming in a series...

Two lexical-decision experiments investigated the effects of semantic priming and stimulus intensity when target location varied and was cued by an abrupt onset. In Experiment 1, the spatial cue was a good predictor of target location, and in Experiment 2 it was not. The results indicate that word recognition processes were postponed until spatial...

Smilek, Eastwood, and Merikle (2000) demonstrated that the detection of change was facilitated when the target character changed in many rather than few of its features. Specifically, the function relating search response time to display set size was shallower when more features changed than when fewer features changed. The researchers interpreted...

The localization of a changing target character has been demonstrated to be facilitated when more features in the target character change than when fewer features change (Smilek, Eastwood, & Merikle, 2000). The purpose of the present paper is to localize the effects of the features changing manipulation with respect to central attention and early,...

Increasing cue duration impairs performance in bar-probe partial report when cues are presented peripherally, but not centrally (P. Dixon, R. Gordon, A. Leung, & V. Di Lollo, 1997). Three experiments examined whether this cue-duration effect reflects processes of exogenous attention. The effect of cue duration on partial report performance with per...

Increasing cue duration impairs performance in bar-probe partial report when cues are presented peripherally, but not centrally (P. Dixon, R. Gordon, A. Leung, & V. Di Lollo, 1997). Three experiments examined whether this cue-duration effect reflects processes of exogenous attention. The effect of cue duration on partial report performance with per...

A same-different letter-matching task was used to examine the effects of stimulus intensity on negative priming, which is poorer performance when target letters have been presented as distractor letters on the immediately preceding trial. In Experiment 1, stimulus intensity was manipulated between-participants, whereas in Experiment 2, it varied ra...

Changes in the conscious and unconscious influences of memory over time were assessed in two experiments by using a variant of the process-dissociation procedure. In both experiments, performance on a stem-completion task was measured under both inclusion and exclusion instructions. Across the two experiments, there were four different retention in...

Three experiments examine whether spatial attention and visual word recognition processes operate independently or interactively in a spatially cued lexical-decision task. Participants responded to target strings that had been preceded first by a prime word at fixation and then by an abrupt onset cue either above or below fixation. Targets appeared...

This paper examines the consequences that codes activated during reading have on activities unrelated to reading by investigating the effects of semantics on temporal order judgments. Participants judged which of two word targets appeared first. Targets appeared either synchronously, or were separated by varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs)....

The "memory" literature emphasizes the notion of encoding variability, whereas the "word recognition and attention" literature typically asserts that it is impossible to prevent immediate lexical and semantic activation when single words are presented to skilled readers. In the four experiments reported here, the presence/absence of a Stroop effect...

The Stroop effect is widely considered to be compelling evidence that an acquired skill such as reading is "automatic" in the sense that lexical/semantic analyses of single words cannot be prevented, even when they are irrelevant and harmful to the task at hand. This view is challenged by a series of three experiments in which the presence/absence...

An intersection of three literatures (skilled word recognition, spatial attention, and the Stroop effect) is addressed in a series of four experiments. The results, in conjunction with other observations, are taken to suggest that (1) the default value for spatial attention in visual word recognition is distributed across the word, (2) precuing a s...

Visual word recognition is widely considered to be automatic in the sense that activation of meaning occurs both in the absence of intent and despite the reader's intent to not read the word. New evidence from the semantic priming paradigm and the Stroop paradigm undermines this view. Semantic processing depends strongly on attentional control over...

A robust semantic priming effect typically occurs in visual word recognition if the prime is read before a response to the target. However, this effect is dramatically reduced if a letter search is performed on the prime prior to responding to the target. Three lexical decision experiments document the new observation that morphological priming is...

Examined whether phonological recoding can be controlled, or whether it is computed (1) even when it is completely irrelevant to the task, and (2) can only hurt performance. 42 undergraduates in each of 2 Stroop type experiments used a key press to indicate the print color of an (irrelevant) letter string that sounded like a color word (e.g., BLOO)...

A robust semantic priming effect typically occurs in visual word recognition if the prime is read prior to a response to the target. M. C. Smith, D. Besner, and H. Miyoshi (1994) reported that this semantic priming effect is markedly reduced for short-duration primes randomly intermixed with longer duration primes, and they offered a signal-detecti...

A widespread view in cognition is that once acquired through extensive practice, mental skills such as reading are automatic. Lexical and semantic analyses of single words are said to be uncontrollable in the sense that they cannot be prevented. Over the past 60 years, apparently convincing support for this assumption has come from hundreds of expe...

The semantic priming effect in lexical decision is widely assumed to reflect automatic processes when the prime is merely read. In contrast, semantic priming is typically eliminated when the prime is subjected to a letter search. The present experiments demonstrate that semantic priming (a) occurs following letter search given a short stimulus onse...

It is widely assumed that orienting attention by the use of exogenous cues reflects an encapsulated system impervious to linguistic influence. This view was assessed in 4 experiments in which observers made discriminations between target characters presented above or below fixation. The spatial location of the target was cued by the abrupt onset of...

As an alternative to establishing awareness thresholds, stimulus contexts in which there were either greater conscious or greater unconscious influences were defined on the basis of performance on an exclusion task. Target words were presented for brief durations and each target word was followed immediately by its three-letter stem. Subjects were...

Two lexical-decision experiments examined the influence of relatedness proportion (RP, the proportion of word-context–word-target trials sharing a semantic relation) and context-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) on the typically observed interaction between the effects of context and stimulus quality. The standard overadditive interaction of c...

describe some evidence for morphological processing in visual word recognition / orthographically similar words with and without a common morpheme are compared in a variety of experimental tasks in order to examine the role of the morpheme / morphological formations whose base morphemes retain their spelling (and pronunciations) under affixation (t...