Research Interests

My interests center on processes underlying attention and automaticity, and how skills (primarily reading-related) are acquired, maintained, and modified by context. Of particular interest to me is how attention interacts with, and is affected by, codes important for reading (e.g., semantics). For instance, is a word's meaning automatically retrieved each time we encounter the word, or is the retrieval of meaning context dependent?

I am also interested in exploring the interaction between attention and consciousness.

Selected Publications

• Stolz, J. A., Besner, D., & Carr, T. H. (2005). Semantic priming is robust but unreliable: Inherent noise and strategic control in the activation and evaluation of semantic knowledge. Visual Cognition, 12, 284 - 336.
• Stolz, J. A., & Jolicoeur, P. (2004). Changing features do not guide attention in change detection: Evidence from a spatial cuing paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 870-875.
• Stolz, J. A., & Stevanovski, B. (2004). Interactive activation in visual word recognition: Constraints imposed by the joint effects of spatial attention and semantics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30, 1064-1076.

Awards

• Premier's Research Excellence Award
• American Psychological Association Division 3 Young Researcher Award