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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 and promote it? I build games to investigate how people learn new concepts. I am interested in charting how understanding evolves 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.