Denitza is currently pursuing her PhD in Developmental Psychology working with Dr. Darko Odic in the Centre for Cognitive Development. Her research interests focus on the relationship between language and cognition, including the role of language in narrowing attention to a subset of possible mental representations and how children learn to interface language with their intuitive cognitive capacities.

Children are overwhelmed with a lot of information within their environments. How do they learn to make sense of it all, and how do they know what information to pay attention to? To solve these puzzles, Denitza explores how language interacts with cognition by investigating one key role of language: narrowing children’s attention to specific representations. She also looks at how children learn to interface language across different dimensions (e.g., number, length, and area) and across development, and how children reason about conflicting information within their environments (e.g., when there are competing perceptual, linguistic, or social cues).

Picon, E., Dramkin, D., & Odic, D. (in press). Visual illusions help reveal the primitives of number perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi:10.1037/xge0000553

• Four-Year Doctoral Fellowship, University of British Columbia (2018-2022)
• International Tuition Award (ITA), University of British Columbia (2018-2019)
• Graduate Affiliated Fellowship Award, University of British Columbia (2017-2018)
• Department of Psychology Research Scholarship, University of British Columbia (2017-2018)
• International Tuition Award, University of British Columbia (2017-2018)
• Faculty of Arts Graduate Entrance Fellowship, University of British Columbia (2016-2017)
• International Tuition Award, University of British Columbia (2016-2017)