Projects per year
Personal profile
Biography
Dr Zhao is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East Anglia. He obtained his undergraduate degree at Henan University and his PhD at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He then moved to the University of Hong Kong and Brown University for postdoctoral research on face processing and spatial navigation. Before joining UEA he was a research scientist at the Max Planck Insitute for Biological Cybernetics.
His research focuses on face perception and recognition and spatial cognition and navigation. He supervises both undergraduate and postgraduate students. For more information, please visit the Person and Space Perception lab here.
Key Research Interests
Dr Zhao is interested in understanding how people interact with their physical and social environment: the space people move around and the people they see. His research mainly focuses on face recognition and spatial navigation, aiming to unravel how people perceive and represent faces and spaces in memory, and how people use these representations to recognize faces and navigate spaces. He takes multiple research approaches to address these questions, including psychophysics, virtual reality, eye-movement tracking, computational modelling, and functional MRI.
If you are interested in a research internship or would like to discuss potential Master's or PhD projects, please get in touch.
Areas of Expertise
Dr Zhao employs multidisciplinary methods to understand the cognitive, neural, and computational mechanisms of person and space perception in the mind, brain, and machines.
He has been a post hoc reviewer for more than twenty psychology and cognitive neuroscience journals and funding bodies (ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, NSF, Irish Research Council, and Israel Science Foundation). He is currently a member of the Outer International Assessment Board (OAB) for the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme and Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme.
Teaching Interests
Dr Zhao contributes to the teaching of the following modules:
PSY-4008Y: Introduction to Psychology
PSY-5017B: Cognitive and Biological Psychology
PSY-6009A: Brain and Cognition
PSY-6018A: Magic Visual World
PSY-6031B: Environmental Psychology
PSY-7010A: Cognitive Neuroscience
PSY-7015A: PSY Lab Skills
Keywords
- Cognition
- Face recognition
- Spatial Cognition
- Emotion
- Emotion perception
- Intergroup Processes
- Cross-culture differences
Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
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Using 3D scanning and printing to investigate human and machine face processing
28/02/21 → 31/08/23
Project: Research
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Personally familiar faces: Higher precision of memory for idiosyncratic than for categorical information
Bülthoff, I. & Zhao, M., Jul 2020, In: Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition. 46, 7, p. 1309–1327 19 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile3 Citations (Scopus)49 Downloads (Pure) -
Decoding subcategories of human bodies from both body- and face-responsive cortical regions
Foster, C., Zhao, M., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J., Bartels, A. & Bülthoff, I., 15 Nov 2019, In: NeuroImage. 202, 116085.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile6 Citations (Scopus)43 Downloads (Pure) -
Human spatial representation: what we cannot learn from the studies of rodent navigation
Zhao, M., 1 Nov 2018, In: Journal of Neurophysiology. 120, 5, p. 2453-2465 13 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile8 Citations (Scopus)24 Downloads (Pure) -
Beyond faces and expertise: Facelike holistic processing of nonface objects in the absence of expertise
Zhao, M., Bülthoff, H. H. & Bülthoff, I., 1 Feb 2016, In: Psychological Science. 27, 2, p. 213-222 10 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile41 Citations (Scopus)22 Downloads (Pure) -
Environmental stability modulates the role of path integration in human navigation
Zhao, M. & Warren, W. H., Sep 2015, In: Cognition. 142, p. 96-109 14 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile36 Citations (Scopus)28 Downloads (Pure)
Activities
- 2 Other
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Manuscript referee for various journals (details in comments)
Mintao Zhao (Reviewer)
2017 → …Activity: Other activity types › Other
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Reviewer for funding bodies and conferences: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); Irish Research Council; Israel Science Foundation; Leverhulme Trust; European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP 2017)
Mintao Zhao (Reviewer)
2017 → …Activity: Other activity types › Other