Penka Yordanova Hristova

Research Units

Affiliated Research areas

• Social aspects of teaching and learning, curriculum studies, education and educational policies
• The Human Mind and Its Complexity
• Personality and social cognition; emotion
• Learning, memory; cognition in ageing
• Reasoning, decision-making; intelligence

Keywords

• Analogical Reasoning
• analogy
• relations
• emotions
• memory
• academic motivation

Teaching areas

• Thinking, reasoning and problem solving
• Constructive memory
• Memory
• Experimental psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Social cognition

Summary

Penka Hristova is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology at New Bulgarian University. She teaches courses in cognitive psychology, thinking, memory and research methods at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
She holds a Master's degree in Cognitive Science and a PhD in General Psychology. Her dissertation focused on contextual effects on judgment and, in particular, on the mechanism by which irrelevant information can shift the so-called comparison set and therefore the final judgment. Her main research interests are in the cognitive mechanisms underlying analogy-making, relational representation and categorisation. Specifically, she focuses on (1) how cognitively demanding analogical mapping, relational priming, and relational encoding are key subprocesses for analogies, (2) what is the LTM representational substrate that drives analogies, and (3) how emotions change the underlying mechanisms of analogy making. In her research, she favours behavioural experiments using simple measures such as accuracy, RT, and d'. Her applied work is primarily in educational psychology (primary and secondary education), seeking to improve the acquisition of transferable knowledge and advance high-level reasoning as a form of relational reasoning.