Mirta Stantic, PhD

I am interested in our visual system’s ability to recognize people from their faces, and its remarkable occasional failures to do so. Consequently, I study individual differences in face perception and face memory across populations.

How come some of us are so great at recognizing faces in everyday life, while others struggle so much? How does your ability to recognize that a face belongs to someone relate to your ability to remember them?

I use various cognitive, computational and neural methods to find answers to these questions. I have a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where I have worked with Geoffrey Bird and Caroline Catmur at the Lab for Clinical Social Cognition. Before moving to the UK, I worked as a data analyst at Facebook and finished my undergraduate degree at Harvard University, where I worked with George Alvarez and Ken Nakayama at the Harvard Vision Lab.

selected publications

  1. Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia show independent impairments in face perception, face memory and face matching.
    Mirta Stantic, Zoe Pounder, Sarah Bate, Tirta Susilo, Caroline Catmur, and Geoffrey Bird
    Cortex, 2022
  2. Use of the Oxford Face Matching Test Reveals an Effect of Ageing on Face Perception but Not Face Memory.
    Mirta Stantic, Bethany Hearne, Caroline Catmur, and Geoffrey Bird
    Cortex, 2021
  3. The Oxford Face Matching Test: A non-biased test of the full range of individual differences in face perception
    Mirta Stantic, Rebecca Brewer, Bradley Duchaine, Michael J Banissy, Sarah Bate, Tirta Susilo, Caroline Catmur, and Geoffrey Bird
    Behavior Research Methods, 2021
  4. Face memory and face perception in autism
    Mirta Stantic, Eri Ichijo, Caroline Catmur, and Geoffrey Bird
    Autism, 2021