The career of Jennifer Stolz '89 is happy proof that happenstance works.
At the end of her sophomore year at Union, the then-biology major was looking for an
elective. She settled on a “Methods” class in the Psychology Department, fell in
love with the experimental psychology at the heart of the class — and now is an assistant
professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Moreover, she is the recent winner of the American Psychological Association's
prestigious New Investigator Award in Experimental Psychology.
Stolz is still happy she took that psychology class.
“It was just so terrific that you could do experiments to answer questions,”
she says. “The 'Methods' class got me into the lab, and that was it; I was hooked. It
was great to not only read about a topic but also to do experiments.”
Stolz's interest in experimental psychology grew into a senior thesis in psychophysics
exploring how people respond to what they see. Stolz was particularly interested in how
people's perceptions don't necessarily reflect what they actually observe. To test this,
she developed an experiment in which subjects were asked to judge the size of a triangle
flashed on a screen. One group of subjects was simply asked to estimate the size of the
triangle, while the other group was first asked to name an angle size of a triangle, such
as a ninety or forty-five degree angle.
“This got people thinking in terms of large numbers and affected their judgments
of the stimuli,” Stolz explains. “The subjects who had first named an angle size
estimated the size of the triangles to be much larger.”
From that point on, Stolz says, she knew she wanted to study experimental psychology.
After graduating (as a psychology major), she entered a doctoral program at the University
of Albany, where her research turned to human cognition — the exploration of how humans
read words and translate a visual stimulus into a given meaning.
Today, Stolz's research follows similar lines, but she is also investigating visual
attention. Some of her most recent studies attempt to prove the existence of subliminal
perception. For example, one recent experiment involved flashing a word at subjects so
rapidly that they would perceive it without consciously observing that they had seen the
word. Then, Stolz and her research assistants work to have the subjects repeat the word
that they unconsciously saw. “It's really all about conscious awareness and
unconscious familiarity,” Stolz says.
Stolz's job involves asking a lot of questions, something she says she loves.
“Every day there is a new puzzle, and there is a lot of freedom to investigate
other opportunities,” she says. She especially likes sharing her research with her
students. “They often come to me with new ideas, and they're so enthusiastic. Every
year you have new students and new ideas; it is a lot of fun, and things are always
changing. I can't think of anything else I would rather be doing.”