Dr. Katharina Schwarz
E-Mail: mail@kaschwarz.net
Raum: JU3.130
Tel.: +49 651 201-1870
Termine nur nach Vereinbarung via E-Mail.
Research Interests
I am interested in how human agents perceive control for their actions and these actions' consequences and how this relates to authorship assumptions (was that me?) and perceived responsibility (am I responsible?), especially in social situations, complex and/or dynamic environments.
I am especially interested in how such perceived control relates to action motivation and, consequently, action selection of future actions, and how this affects such global and individual concerns as sustainability behaviour, engagement in political landscapes, mental health, and stress.
Aside from these main topics, I’m interested in perception-action interactions, expectancy effects, history of psychology, and research methods.
My research follows Open Science principles, including preregistrations, openly providing analyses scripts, and providing anonymized raw data if not precluded by data protection considerations. All student work supervised by me (i.e., Bachelor and Master theses) also follows these principles.
Extracurriculars
Reconciling family life with a scientific career is still not that easy.
Together with a group of other psychological researchers, I have started a blog answering frequent questions regarding life as both, researcher and parent. Is a conference the right place to bring your family? How can (and frequently do) days look like when you have kid duty but also need to write this article (damn it)? Find experience reports on these and more questions on https://parenthesis-blog.de (unfortunately, only in German).
Public Outreach
Radio:
Biographical Sketch
since 05/2024 | Principal Investigator at Trier University |
12/2022-03/2023 | Visiting Fellow at the School of Psychology, Speech, and Hearing of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand |
09/2018-04/2024 | Principal Investigator at the University of Würzburg |
09/2015-08/2018 | Post-Doc at the University of Würzburg (Prof. Wilfried Kunde); focus: Cognitive Psychology |
01/2011-06/2015 | PhD at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (Prof. Christian Büchel); focus: Systems Neuroscience |
08/2010-11/2010 | Visiting Researcher at the Massachusetts institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA |
10/2004-03/2010 | Diploma Studies in Biology at the University of Würzburg (focus: Neurobiology, Biological Psychology, Genetics) and at the Umeå Universitet, Sweden (focus: Tumour Biology) |
Career Breaks: | altogether 30 months of maternity leave and parental leave between 2014 and 2020 (3 children) |
Journal Articles
2023/2024/ in press
36 | Seubert, O., van der Wel, R., Reis, M., Pfister, R., & Schwarz, K. A. (in press). The one exception: The impact of statistical regularities on explicit sense of agency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. | |
35 | Pfister, R., Schwarz, K. A., Holzmann, P., Reis, M., Yogeeswaran, K., & Kunde, W. (2023). Headlines win elections: Mere exposure to fictitious news media alters voting behavior. PLOS ONE. | |
34 | Reis, M., Pfister, R., & Schwarz, K. A. (2023). The value of control. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. | OSF |
33 | Schwarz, K. A., Tonn, S., Büttner, J., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2023). Sense of agency in social hierarchies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(10), 2957-2976. | OSF |
32 | Schwarz, K. A., & Weller, L. (2023). Distracted to a fault - Attention, actions, and time perception. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 85, 301-314. |
2021/2022
31 | Foerster, A., Steinhauser, M., Schwarz, K. A., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2022). Error cancellation. Royal Society Open Science, 9(3). | OSF |
30 | Schwarz, K. A., Klaffehn, A. L., Hauke-Forman, N., Muth, F. V., & Pfister, R. (2022). Never run a changing system: Action-effect contingency shapes prospective agency. Cognition, 229, 105250. | OSF |
29 | Pfister, R.*, Tonn, S.*, Weller, L., Kunde, W., & Schwarz, K. A. (2021). To prevent means to know: Explicit but no implicit agency for prevention behavior. Cognition, 206, 104489. (* equal author contribution) | OSF |
28 | Tonn, S., Pfister, R., Klaffehn, A. L., Weller, L., Schwarz, K. A. (2021). Two faces of temporal binding: Action- and effect-binding are not correlated. Consciousness and Cognition, 96, 103219. | OSF |
2019/2020
27 | Weller, L., Schwarz, K. A., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2020). Something from nothing: Agency for deliberate nonactions. Cognition, 104136, 1-10. | OSF |
26 | Pfister, R., Wirth, R., Weller, L., Foerster, A., & Schwarz, K. A. (2019). Taking shortcuts: Cognitive conflict during motivated rule-breaking. Journal of Economic Psychology, 71, 138-147. | OSF |
25 | Schwarz, K. A., Sprenger, C., Hidalgo, P., Pfister, R., Diekhof, E. K., & Büchel, C. (2019). How stereotypes affect pain. Scientific Reports. 9, 8626. | |
24 | Schwarz, K. A., Weller, L., Klaffehn, A. L., & Pfister, R. (2019). The effects of action choice on temporal binding, agency ratings, and their correlation. Consciousness and Cognition, 75, 102807. | OSF |
23 | Schwarz, K. A., Weller, L., Pfister, R., & Kunde, W. (2019). Connecting action control and agency: Does action-effect binding affect temporal binding? Consciousness and Cognition, 76, 102833. | OSF |
2017/2018
22 | Klaffehn, A. L., Schwarz, K. A., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2018). Similar task-switching performance of real-time strategy and first-person shooter players: Implications for cognitive training. Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, 2(3), 240-258. | OSF |
21 | Pfister, R., & Schwarz, K. A. (2018). Should we pre-date the beginning of scientific psychology to 1787? Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 9, 2481. | |
20 | Schwarz, K. A., Burger, S., Dignath, D., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2018). Action-effect binding and agency. Consciousness and Cognition, 65, 304-309. | OSF |
19 | Schwarz, K. A., Pfister, R., Kluge, M., Weller, L., & Kunde, W. (2018). Do we see it or not? Sensory attenuation in the visual domain. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(3), 418-430. | OSF |
18 | Schwarz, K.A.*, Pfister, R.*, Wirth, R., & Kunde, W. (2018). Dissociating action-effect activation and effect-based response selection. Acta Psychologica, 188, 16-24. (* = equal author contribution) | OSF |
17 | Weller, L., Schwarz, K. A., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2018). My mistake? Enhanced error processing for commanded compared to passively observed actions. Psychophysiology. | |
16 | Jusyte, A., Pfister, R., Mayer, S. V., Schwarz, K. A., Wirth, R., Kunde, W., & Schönenberg, M. (2017). Smooth criminal: Convicted rule-breakers show reduced cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations. Psychological Research, 81(5), 939-946. | |
15 | Muth, F. V., Schwarz, K. A., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2017). Feeling watched: What determines perceived observation? Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 4(3), 298-309. | OSF |
14 | Pfister, R., Schwarz, K. A., Wirth, R., & Lindner, I. (2017). My command, my act: Observation inflation in face-to-face interactions. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 13(2), 166-176. | OSF |
13 | Schwarz, K. A., Pfister, R., & Büchel, C. (2017). The Being a Patient effect: Negative expectations based on group labeling and corresponding treatment affect patient performance. Psychology, Health & Medicine, 23(1), 99-105. | |
12 | Weller, L., Schwarz, K. A., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2017). Was it me? - Filling the interval between action and effects increases agency but not sensory attenuation. Biological Psychology, 123, 241-249. |
2015/2016
11 | Schwarz, K. A., Pfister, R., & Büchel, C. (2016). Rethinking explicit expectations: Connecting placebos, social cognition, and contextual perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(6), 469-480. | |
10 | Holtfrerich, S. K. C., Schwarz, K. A., Sprenger, C., Reimers, L., & Diekhof, E. K. (2016). Endogenous testosterone and exogenous oxytocin modulate attentional processing of infant faces. PLoS ONE, 11(11), e0166617. | |
9 | Pfister, R., Wirth, R., Schwarz, K. A., Foerster, A., Steinhauser, M., & Kunde, W. (2016). The electrophysiological signature of deliberate rule violations. Psychophysiology, 53, 1870-1877. | |
8 | Pfister, R., Wirth, R., Schwarz, K. A., Steinhauser, M., & Kunde, W. (2016). Burdens of non-conformity: Motor execution reveals cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations. Cognition, 147, 93-99. | |
7 | Schwarz, K. A., & Pfister, R. (2016). Scientific psychology in the 18th century: a historical rediscovery. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(3), 399-407. | |
6 | Schwarz, K. A., & Büchel, C. (2015). Cognition and the placebo effect - Dissociating subjective perception and actual performance. PLoS ONE, 10(7), e0130492. |
2014 and before
5 | Wieser, M. J., Gerdes, A., Büngel, I., Schwarz, K. A., Mühlberger, A., & Pauli, P. (2014) Not so harmless anymore: How context impacts the perception and electrocortical processing of neutral faces. NeuroImage 93, 74-82. | |
4 | Pfister, R., Schwarz, K. A., Janczyk, M., Dale, R., & Freeman, J. B. (2013). Good things peak in pairs: A note on the bimodality coefficient. Frontiers in Quantitive Psychology and Measurement, 4, 700. | |
3 | Pfister, R., Schwarz, K. A., Carson, R., & Janczyk, M. (2013). Easy methods for extracting individual regression slopes: Comparing SPSS, R, and Excel. Tutorials in Quantitative Methods for Psychology, 9(2), 72-78. | |
2 | Schwarz, K. A., Wieser, M.J., Gerdes A. B. M., Mühlberger, A., & Pauli, P. (2013). Why are you looking like that? How the context influences evaluation and processing of human faces. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8, 438-445. | |
1 | Pfister, R., Schwarz, K. A., & Janczyk, M. (2012). Ubi irritatio, ibi affluxus: A 19th century perspective on haemodynamic brain activity. Cortex, 48(8), 1061-1063. |
Books, Book Chapters
Pfister, R., Foerster, A., Schwarz, K. A., & Wirth, R. (2014). Lässt sich ein guter Hochstapler als solcher entlarven? Wenn ja: Wie? In W. Schwanebeck (Eds.), Über Hochstapelei: Perspektiven auf eine kulturelle Praxis (pp 63-72). Berlin: Neofelis Verlag. |