Mirta Stantic, PhD

I am a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. I completed my DPhil at 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. Before that, I completed my undergraduate degree at Harvard University, where I worked with George Alvarez and Ken Nakayama at the Harvard Vision Lab.

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, including typical and atypical groups. This includes investigating how we perceive and remember faces, how we learn to form representations of other people over time, and how manipulations to these processes can be used to enhance learning ability, particularly in populations with impairments.

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? How does the environment in which you encounter a face contribute to your ability to learn it?

I use various cognitive, computational and neural methods to find answers to these questions.