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Contact information


tsvetomira.dumbalska@psy.ox.ac.uk


DPhil Thesis


ORCID ID ORCID identifier


she/her

Tsvetomira Dumbalska

BA (Hons), MSc, DPhil

Postdoctoral Researcher

  • Human Information Processing (Summerfield Lab)

Research Summary

My research focuses on human understanding. How can we characterize, measure and promote it? I am building new assessment tools that quantify the understanding of concepts, theories and problems. These assessments are fun, but complex games (e.g. this escape room inspired maze) allowing for prolonged user engagement. Using these tools, I plan to chart how understanding emerges and develops over time.

My background is an interdisciplinary blend of experimental psychology and economics. During my DPhil, I investigated how irrelevant information present in the context of a decision affects human choices across domains. I combined psychophysical experiments with computational modeling to chart the behavioral signatures of context dependence and arbitrate between different theoretical accounts of the  mechanisms underlying context-dependent decision making.

Teaching & Supervision

I am the visiting student program coordinator at Pembroke College and the  Statistics tutor for first-year undergraduate students in Wadham College. I have previously led tutorials in perception, cognition and visual neuroscience for Experimental Psychology and Biomedical Sciences undergraduate students. Outside of psychology, I have served as a teaching assistant in applied programming classes and in final year undergraduate economics courses. I have also co-supervised several undergraduate research projects in the department.

Recent publications

More publications

Open Science

I am a Reproducible Research Oxford Fellow and co-lead an interdisciplinary reading group focused on the promotion of diversity and equality in computational and quantitative fields.