Ning Ma

South China Normal University · Department of Psychology

A series of studies have shown that sleep loss impairs one’s capability for sustained attention. However, the underlying neurobiological mechanism linking sleep loss with sustained attention has not been elucidated. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on the resting‐state brain and explored whether the magnitude o...

Background Sleep deprivation strongly deteriorates the stability of vigilant maintenance. In previous neuroimaging studies of large-scale networks, neural variations in the resting state after sleep deprivation have been well documented, highlighting that large-scale networks implement efficient cognitive functions and attention regulation in a spa...

Gossip, sharing information about an absent person, is an important way of spreading reputational information, crucial in fostering human cooperation. However, why should information possessors engage in gossip, and why should they be honest? We addressed this question based on a reputational account. In study 1, we found that when observed by pote...

Previous research suggested the homeostatic effect on the top-down control system as a major factor for daytime vigilance decrement, yet how it alters the cognitive processes of vigilance remains unclear. Using EEG, the current study measured the vigilance of 28 participants under three states: the morning, the midafternoon after napping and no-nap...

A series of studies have suggested that stage N2 is vulnerable and strongly affected by the first-night effect (FNE). However, the neurophysiological mechanism underlying the vulnerability of stage N2 of the FNE has not been well examined. A total of 17 healthy adults (11 women and 6 men, mean age: 21.59 ± 2.12) underwent two nights of polysomnogra...

Vigilance is highly sensitive to the time-of-day effect and goes through the daytime trough during the period of the post-noon dip. A midday nap could maintain individ-uals' vigilance at an optimal level. Thus, homeostatic sleep pressure is one of the main reasons for the post-noon dip in daytime vigilance. The current study focussed on the role of...

Willems (this issue) proposes a neurocognitive model with a central role allotted to ambiguity in perceived morality and emotion in driving involvement of reflective/mentalizing processes. We argue that abstractness of representation has more explanatory power in this respect. We illustrate this with examples from the verbal and non-verbal domain s...

Previous studies have suggested that individuals with hypercompetitive attitude and interpersonal insecurity would have a high level of anxiety, and anxiety has been found to strongly impact on sleep quality. However, the associations between competitive attitudes and sleep quality have not been studied until now. The present study aimed to examine...

T here have been rich debates about whether and how mindfulness alters prosocial behaviour. Nevertheless, few empirical studies have touched on how mindfulness training (MT) influences altruistic behaviour under high-and low-cost situations in a real-life scenario. The present study aimed to examine the effect of mindfulness training on altruistic...

A series of studies have demonstrated that impaired vigilance performance caused by total sleep deprivation could restore to baseline when recovery sleep is longer than the habitual sleep. However, it is unclear which factors on the recovery night affected the restoration of vigilance performance impaired by sleep deprivation. 22 participant's slee...

The thalamus is an essential gating hub to relay brainstem ascending arousal signals to attention‐related networks, including the frontal–parietal attention network and default mode network, which plays an important role in attentional maintenance. Research has proved that sleep loss leads to impairment of attentional performance by affecting neura...

Under the burden caused by COVID-19 and rapid lifestyle changes, many people increased their screen time due to psychological needs and social requirements. The current study investigated the relationship between screen time changes and anxiety symptoms during the pandemic of COVID-19. Furthermore, we examined whether sleep and physical activity wo...

Vigilance instability in the sleep‐deprived state was deemed to result from the imbalance in thalamic‐FPN‐DMN circuits (FPN: frontoparietal network; DMN: default mode network), but the behavioral correlation of this neural hypothesis is still unclear. To address this issue, we applied dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) analysis on the task‐based...

Behavioral inhibitory control (BIC) acts as a key cognitive ability, which is essential for humans to withhold inappropriate behaviors. Meanwhile, many studies reported that long-term exposure to high altitude (HA) may affect cognitive ability. However, it is not clear whether long-term exposure to HAs may affect the BIC of an individual. To clarif...

Background It has been postulated that the neurobiological mechanism responsible for the onset of symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), especially compulsive behavior, is related to alterations of the goal-directed and habitual learning systems. However, little is known about whether changes in these learning systems co-occur with change...

The present study aimed to investigate how mindfulness training might influence each attentional network. Fifty-seven female participants between 18 and 28 years old were recruited. Thirty-seven of them participated in an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), while completing Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and revised vers...

Background: Although the deterioration of subjective and objective alertness during prolonged wakefulness has been investigated rigorously, whether perceived sleepiness and fatigue are consistent with actual decrements in behavioral performance in the time course is still disputed. The present study examined the dissociation between decrements of...

Previous neuroimaging studies have revealed neural representation of traits in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but related studies mainly investigated the neural representation of warmth or competence trait respectively. To identify the potential differences of trait codes of warmth and competence in the mPFC, we applied functional magnetic re...

This study aimed to assess changes in sleep pattern and their influence on people's daily life and emotion during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Self‐developed questionnaires were used to measure changes in nocturnal sleep, daytime napping, lifestyles and negative emotions in individuals before and after the COVID‐19 pandemic. Nine hundred and thirty effec...

Objective: Depression is highly prevalent among 1st-year college students, and evening chronotype is an important risk factor associated with depression. This study investigates the mediating role of sleep quality and the moderating role of resilience between chronotype and depressive symptoms. Methods: A total of 4531 students were included in th...

Background: Both sleep quality and depression could affect cognitive performance in older adults. Previous studies have suggested that there are bi-directional relationships between sleep quality and depression. Possibly, the influence of sleep quality on cognition is partly mediated by depression, and vice versa. Objective: We aimed to assess t...

Background: Previous studies have demonstrated that individuals showed higher risk preference in the afternoon than in the morning. However, few studies aimed to explore the alteration of feedback learning effect during risky decision making, which is one of the important psychological processes of real risk behaviors. Moreover, cognitive function...

Introduction Cooperation, the cornerstone of human interaction, has attracted much attention since it was indispensable in the contemporary world. However, little research has been done on whether sleep deprivation altered human cooperative behavior. In the present work, we investigated cooperation and sleep deprivation directly, aiming to evaluate...

Objective: The aim of our study was to investigate the influences of acute sleep deprivation on cooperation with two classical social dilemmas, the Prisoner's dilemma (PD) and the chicken dilemma (CD). Methods: All participants (N=24) were required to come for the experiments twice; one time for normal sleep condition, the other time for sleep d...

The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) provides a reliable and ecologically valid model for the assessment of individual risk-taking propensity and is frequently used in neuroimaging and developmental research. Although the test-retest reliability of risk-taking behavior during the BART is well established, the reliability of brain activation patter...

There exist inconsistent findings about the relation between cosleeping and sleep problems in children. We conducted a metaanalysis to assess these relations and compared their cross-cultural differences. We searched the EMBASE, PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science databases. A random effect model was used, and subgroup...

Introduction The effects of sleep deprivation (SD) on decision-making are particularly complex, and the results of the relative previous studies were inconsistent. In the present study, we applied a modified Ultimatum Game to investigate the potential mechanism of the effect of sleep deprivation on sense of fairness. Methods Fifteen college studen...

Introduction Cognitive control refers to the ability to guide attention, thought and action in accord with goals or intentions. The impairment of cognitive control caused by sleep deprivation (SD) has been extensively studied. But the effects of sleep deprivation on the circadian rhythm of cognitive control remain unknown. Here we examined whether...

Introduction Sleep deprivation (SD) leads to significant alertness impairment and excessive sleepiness. Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) is an objective tool quantify alertness. We proposed to compare the trends of PVT performance with subjective indicators from 0:00 to 6:00 in the morning after sleep loss. Methods Seventeen healthy adults (7 male...

Introduction Midday napping is a common behavior among Chinese population. Previous studies have shown that a brief midday napping could impact individual working memory and positive affect. Midday napping might improve individual working memory through the change of positive affect. Our study examined the impact of midday napping on individual wor...

Introduction Screen media use near bedtime has been shown to impact sleep quality adversely, and may lead to the compression of sleep duration. However, few studies have extracted valid sleep time from total sleep time and examined whether the exposure to screen media near bedtime is associated with daytime sleepiness and self-satisfaction. Here we...

Exposure to bright light is typically intermittent in our daily life. However, the acute effects of intermittent light on alertness and sleep have seldom been explored. To investigate this issue, we employed within-subject design and compared the effects of three light conditions: intermittent bright light (30-min pulse of blue-enriched bright ligh...

This study investigated the impact of indoor illuminance and correlated color temperature (CCT) on healthy adults’ cognitive performance, subjective mood, and alertness during daytime office hours and differences in time-of-day effects. A 2(illuminance) × 2(CCT) × 2(morning vs. afternoon) mixed design (N = 60) was employed. Participants felt less s...

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is part of the mentalizing network, a set of brain regions consistently engaged in inferring mental states. However, its precise function in this network remains unclear. It has recently been proposed that the dmPFC is involved in high-level abstract (i.e., categorical) identification or construction of bot...

Scientific Reports 6 : Article number: 39609 10.1038/srep39609 ; published online: 20 December 2016 ; updated: 23 January 2017 This Article contains a typographical error in the Affiliation of the author Tingyong Feng.

Previous neuroimaging studies have revealed that a trait code is mainly represented in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). However, those studies only investigated the neural code of warmth traits. According to the ‘Big Two’ model of impression formation, competence traits are the other major dimension when we judge others. The current st...

This multi-study analysis (6 fMRI studies; 142 participants) explores the functional activation and connectivity of the cerebellum with the cerebrum during repeated behavioral information uptake informing about personality traits of different persons. The results suggest that trait repetition recruits activity in areas belonging to the mentalizing...

Morality and empathy are both crucial in building human society. Yet the relationship between them has been merely explored. The present study revealed how the morality influenced empathy for pain by comparing the ERPs elicited by pictures showing the targets’ in pain primed by different moral information about the targets. We found that when the t...

This study investigates to what extent social and competence traits are represented in a similar or different neural trait code. To localize these trait codes, we used fMRI repetition suppression, which is a rapid reduction of neuronal responses upon repeated presentation of the same implied trait. Participants had to infer an agent's trait from br...

Although insufficient sleep is a well-recognized risk factor for overeating and weight gain, the neural mechanisms underlying increased caloric (particularly fat) intake after sleep deprivation remain unclear. Here we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and examined brain connectivity changes associated with macronutrient intak...

attention is a cognitive domain that can be severely affected by sleep deprivation. Previous neuroimaging studies have used different attention paradigms and reported both increased and reduced brain activation after sleep deprivation. However, due to large variability in sleep deprivation protocols, task paradigms, experimental designs, characteri...

This study compares brain activation during causal attribution to three different loci, the self, another person and the situation; and further explores correlations with clinical scales (i.e. depression, anxiety and autism) in a typical population. While they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging, 20 participants read short sentences abo...

Recent fMRI studies indicate that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and the mirror system are involved in analyzing goal-directed actions performed by non-human objects. However, these studies have some limitations: the animations showed moving shapes that resemble humans and human movement, or showed the interaction of two moving shape...

A previous functional MRI adaptation study on trait inference indicated that a trait code is located in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), but could not rule out that this adaptation effect is due to the trait’s underlying valence. To address this issue, we presented sentences describing positive and negative valences of either a human t...

Neuroimaging studies on trait inference about the self and others have found a network of brain areas, the critical part of which appears to be medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We investigated whether the mPFC plays an essential role in the neural representation of a trait code. To localize the trait code, we used functional magnetic resonance imag...

Recent studies suggest that a brain network mainly associated with episodic memory has a more general function in imagining oneself in another time, place or perspective (e.g. episodic future thought, theory of mind, default mode). If this is true, counterfactual thinking (e.g. 'If I had left the office earlier, I wouldn't have missed my train.') s...

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is consistently involved in tasks requiring the processing of mental states, and much rarer so by tasks that do not involve mental state inferences. We hypothesized that the dmPFC might be more generally involved in high construal of stimuli, defined as the formation of concepts or ideas by omitting non-ess...

Past fMRI research has demonstrated that to understand other people's behavior shown visually, the mirror network is strongly involved. However, the mentalizing network is also recruited when a visually presented action is unusual and/or when perceivers think explicitly about the intention. To further explore the conditions that trigger mentalizing...

It has been suggested that the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is involved in inferring immediate goals and intentions from behaviors, whereas the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) integrates social information, such as traits, at a more abstract level. To explore the differential role of the TPJ and mPFC, participants read several verbal description...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research explores how observers make causal beliefs about an event in terms of the person or situation. Thirty-four participants read various short descriptions of social events that implied either the person or the situation as the cause. Half of them were explicitly instructed to judge whether the...

This study explores the fMRI correlates of observers making trait inferences about other people under conflicting social cues. Participants were presented with several behavioral descriptions involving an agent that implied a particular trait. The last behavior was either consistent or inconsistent with the previously implied trait. This was done u...

This fMRI study analyzes inferences on other persons' traits, whereby half of the participants were given spontaneous ("read") instructions while the other half were given intentional ("infer the person's trait") instructions. Several sentences described the behavior of a target person from which a strong trait could be inferred (trait diagnostic)...

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium1. IntroductionWhen something bad happens, we often think howthings could have turned out differently (e.g., “If I hadset my alarm, I would not have missed my appoint-ment.”). Imagining an alternative reality, which couldhave replaced the actual one, is called counterfactualthinking. Counterfactual thoug...