Dr Mintao Zhao is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East Anglia.  He completed his PhD study in the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He then moved to the University of Hong Kong and Brown Univerisity to do postdoctoral research on face processing and spatial navigation.  Before joining UEA he had been 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 postgraduate and undergraduate students. For more information, please visit the Person and Space Perception lab here. 

We are interested in understanding how we interact with their surrounding physical and social environment: the space we move around and the people we see. Our research mainly focuses on face recognition and spatial navigation, aiming to unravel how we perceive and represent faces and spaces in memory, and how we use these representations to recognize faces and to navigate in places.  We take 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 or PhD projects, please drop us a line.

Dr Mintao 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 (Module Organiser)

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)

Ad-hoc journal reviewer: 

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics; Behavioral Brain Research; British Journal of Psychology; Cognition; Cognitive Psychology;  Experimental Brain Research; Experimental Psychology; Frontiers in Psychology; Hippocampus; Infancy; Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; Journal of Cognitive Psychology; JEP: General; JEP: HPP; JEP: LMC; Journal of Vision; Memory; Memory & Cognition; Perception; PLoS ONE; Psychological Bulletin & Review; Psychological Research; Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology; Scientific Report; Vision Research; Visual Cognition