Dr. Zhou's primary research areas are television news and human cognition of mediated messages using news as his primary stimuli. Zhou engages in three areas of investigation involving the representation, utilization, and manipulation of information on television. He studies how people learn from television news, focusing on the basic processes of news cognition, including perception, attention and memory as well as individual and situational differences in cognition. Zhou has published numerous articles in flagship communication journals.
Zhou is the current editor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, editor of Communication and Society and associate editor of Computers in Human Behavior, as well as a member of the editorial board of several peer-reviewed journals.
