Iliyana Trifonova

Iliyana Trifonova joined the School of Psychology at UEA as a Senior Research Associate in 2022. Dr. Trifonova has Bachelor's degrees in Psychology and in English Philology (Veliko Turnovo University) and Master's degrees in both Cognitive Science (New Bulgarian University) and Human Resource Management (Sofia University). She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Warwick, UK, where she worked on visual word recognition. She used behavioural methods, as well as computational and statistical modelling, to explore orthographic processing effects, such as lexical competition and repeated letter effects on the identification of written words. After finishing her Ph.D, she was awarded an Early Career Fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. Dr. Trifonova then moved to the University of York, UK, where she worked as a postdoctoral Research Associate on face recognition and face perception. Her work explored identification of unfamiliar faces in realistic contexts, such as virtual reality environments with airport passport control.  She also used virtual reality environments to study how personality traits are inferred in dynamic social contexts like approach and avoidance.

In her current role at UEA, Dr Trifonova uses computational modelling to explore language processes such as statistical auditory word learning and recognition of spoken words.

Cognitive science, visual word recognition, face recognition, face perception, computational modelling, statistical learning, psycholinguistics.