Contact
Biography
I graduated from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC) in 2014, with a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. Subsequently, I moved to Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) to do my PhD in Dr. Isabelle Mareschal's lab, on a project investigating natural scene perception. After obtaining my Doctorate from QMUL and having been an Associate Lecturer (2017-2018) at the same institution, I started at UNMC as an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology in September 2018.
Teaching Summary
I am currently involved in teaching for the following modules:
PSGY2012 - Cognitive psychology 2
PSGY1015 - Practical methods in Psychology
PSGY2016 - Practical methods in Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience
PSGY3047 - Scientific computing with Matlab
Research Summary
Themes: Image classification, short-term and long-term visual adaptation, prior expectations, gaze behaviour and eye-hand coordination
My work primarily focuses on examining neural mechanisms underlying people's ability to rapidly classify objects and scenes. I am particularly interested in finding out how classification is influenced by: 1) people's expectations about the characteristics of the physical environment and the sociocultural context in which they live, and 2) perceptual experiences in the recent past. I am also collaborating on projects of the Active vision lab that investigate gaze behaviour and eye-hand coordination.
I conduct experimental research in laboratory, realistic and real-world settings, and I use a combination of psychophysics and eye-tracking techniques. Below is a list of current projects:
Perceptual biases in object classification
Contextual effects on facial emotion recognition
Orientation and spatial frequency sensitivity in image classification
Short term and long term adaptation to visual features
Anticipatory gaze movements in badminton players
Leong, B. Q. Z., Estudillo, A. J., & Ismail, A. M. H. (2023). Holistic and featural processing's link to face recognition varies by individual and task. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 16869. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-44164-w
Kunasegaran, K., Ismail, A. M. H., Ramasamy, S., Gnanou, J. V., Caszo, B. A., & Chen, P. L. (2023). Understanding mental fatigue and its detection: a comparative analysis of assessments and tools. PeerJ, 11, e15744. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15744
Irwantoro, K., Nimsha Nilakshi Lennon, N., Mareschal, I., & Ismail, A. M. H. (2023). Contextualising facial expressions: The effect of temporal context and individual differences on classification. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(2), 450-459. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221094296
Ismail, A. M. H., Solomon, J. A., Hansard, M., & Mareschal, I. (2019). A perceptual bias for man-made objects in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 286. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2019.1492
Ismail, A. M. H., Solomon, J. A., Hansard, M., & Mareschal, I. (2016). A tilt after-effect for images of buildings: Evidence of selectivity to the orientation of everyday scenes. Proceedings of the Royal Society Open Science, 3(1), 160551.
Abstracts
Ismail, A. M. H., Solomon, J. A., Hansard, M., & Mareschal, I. (2017). Spatiotemporal dynamics of orientation processing during scene recognition. Perception, 46(1), 1220-1221.
Ismail, A. M. H., Solomon, J. A., Hansard, M., & Mareschal, I. (2016). A generalized tilt after-effect. Journal of Vision, 16(12), 877.
Ismail, A. M. H., Solomon, J. A., Hansard, M., & Mareschal, I. (2016). Adaptation to tilted scenes. Perception, 45(6), 699.
Mennie, N. R., Zulkifli, N. A., Mahadzir, M., & Miflah, A. (2014). Spatio-temporal dynamics of the use of gaze in natural tasks by a Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii). Journal of Vision, 14(10), 1449.