Elena Albu

Elena Albu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen, working within the Faculty of Science, Department of Psychology. She is affiliated with the Diagnostics and Cognitive Neuropsychology Research Group and contributes to the DFG Research Unit FOR 2718: Modal and Amodal Cognition: Functions and Interactions, focusing on the interplay between modal and amodal encodings underlying space-metric associations.

Her research centers on the nature of SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) and SNARC-like effects, investigating whether these phenomena stem from continuous magnitude processing or require discrete serial ordering. With a strong background in linguistics, she equally explores language comprehension and negation processing through rigorous behavioral studies. Her work bridges cognitive psychology and linguistic theory to understand fundamental cognitive mechanisms.

Analysis of her publication trajectory reveals a clear evolution from early work analyzing negation in political discourse and social media (particularly during the 2014 European Elections) to more recent investigations of the cognitive architecture supporting negation processing. Her research consistently integrates experimental techniques with corpus analysis, providing both controlled laboratory findings and real-world usage patterns across cognitive psychology, linguistics, and political communication.

Her notable recognition includes:

• Humboldt Research Fellowship for postdoctoral researchers

Dr. Albu actively supervises student research projects investigating fundamental questions about negation processing, including whether negative sentences can express events and what mental representations people form when reading negative information. Her current work within the DFG Research Unit examines how different cognitive systems interact in processing spatial and numerical information.

As a member of the Diagnostics and Cognitive Neuropsychology Research Group, she collaborates with colleagues including Maristella Lunardon, Katharina Sautter, Mine Avcil, Christina Artemenko, and others on projects related to cognitive processing, neuropsychological assessment, and the cognitive underpinnings of language comprehension.