Yin WangBeijing Normal University | bnu · State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning
Yin Wang
PhD in Psychology
About
38
Publications
19,582
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1,508
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Introduction
social cognitive neuroscience
Additional affiliations
May 2013 - May 2015
November 2011 - January 2013
Education
September 2008 - November 2011
September 2004 - July 2008
Publications
Publications (38)
When two people meet in a bar, a subtle interplay of social behaviours, including eye contact and unconscious mimicry of actions play an important role in how much the individuals like each other by the end of the evening. However, it is not known how these different social signals interact. Here, we adopt a rapid mimicry paradigm, to test if eye c...
Spontaneous mimicry of other people's actions serves an important social function, enhancing affiliation and social interaction. This mimicry can be subtly modulated by different social contexts. We recently found behavioral evidence that direct eye gaze rapidly and specifically enhances mimicry of intransitive hand movements (Wang et al., 2011). B...
As a distinct feature of human social interactions, spontaneous mimicry has been widely investigated in the past decade. Research suggests that mimicry is a subtle and flexible social behavior which plays an important role for communication and affiliation. However, fundamental questions like why and how people mimic still remain unclear. In this p...
Notwithstanding the significant role that human-robot interactions will play in the near future, limited research has explored the neural correlates of feeling eerie in response to social robots. To address this empirical lacuna, the current investigation examined brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging while a group of participa...
Significance
Knowledge about other people is critical for group survival and may have unique cognitive processing demands. Here, we investigate how person knowledge is represented, organized, and retrieved in the brain. We show that the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) stores abstract person identity representation that is commonly embedded in multiple...
Seminal work in the 1990’s found alterations in the cerebellum of individuals with social disorders including autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. In neurotypical populations, distinct portions of the posterior cerebellum are consistently activated in fMRI studies of social cognition and it has been hypothesized that the cerebellum plays an...
The study results identify that function of vmPFC mainly involves three functions including social, value and emotion and generate three functional subregions which present anterior-to-posterior functional distribution according to social, value and emotion in vmPFC by reverse
inference meta-analysis from a large-scale neuroimaging dataset.
The cerebellum has been traditionally disregarded in relation to nonmotor functions, but recent findings indicate it may be involved in language, affective processing, and social functions. Mentalizing, or Theory of Mind (ToM), is the ability to infer mental states of others and this skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions. Here, we...
Humans have a remarkable ability to infer the mind of others. This mentalizing skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions but how these regions connect and interact is not well understood. Here we leveraged large-scale multimodal neuroimaging data to elucidate the brain-wide organization and mechanisms of mentalizing processing. Key con...
The cerebellum has been traditionally disregarded in relation to non-motor functions, but recent findings indicate it may be involved in language, affective processing, and social functions. Mentalizing is the ability to infer mental states of others and this skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions. Here, we leveraged large-scale mul...
Humans have a remarkable ability to infer the mind of others. This mentalizing skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions but how these regions connect and interact is not well understood. Here we leveraged large-scale multimodal neuroimaging data to elucidate the connectome-level organization and brain-wide mechanisms of mentalizing pr...
Face processing supports our ability to recognize friend from foe, form tribes and understand the emotional implications of changes in facial musculature. This skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions, but how these regions interact is poorly understood. Here we integrate anatomical and functional connectivity measurements with behavi...
Detection of the relevant brain regions for characterizing the distinction between cognitive conditions is one of the most sought after objectives in neuroimaging research. A popular approach for achieving this goal is the multivariate pattern analysis which is currently conducted through a number of approaches such as the popular searchlight proce...
Evaluating other people's social encounters from a third-person perspective is a ubiquitous activity of daily life. Yet little is known about how these evaluations are affected by racial bias. To overcome this empirical lacuna, two experiments were conducted. The first experiment used evaluative priming to show that both Black (n = 44) and White Am...
Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of stimuli to reveal their representation in higher-order space. In the context of neuroimaging, mass-univariate analyses and other multivariate analyses can provide information on what and where information is represented but have limitations in...
Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is a computational technique which uses pairwise comparisons of stimuli to reveal their representation in higher-order space. In the context of neuroimaging, mass-univariate analyses and other multivariate analyses can provide information on what and where information is represented but have limitations in...
Detecting the most relevant brain regions for explaining the distinction between cognitive conditions is one of the most sought after objectives in neuroimaging research. A popular approach for achieving this goal is the multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) which is commonly conducted through the searchlight procedure as well as a number of other a...
Social neuroscience has traditionally focused on the functionality of gray matter regions, ignoring the critical role played by axonal fiber pathways in supporting complex social processes. In this paper, we argue that research on white matter is essential for understanding a range of topics in social neuroscience, such as face processing, theory o...
There is a growing consensus that social cognition and behavior emerge from interactions across distributed regions of the "social brain". Researchers have traditionally focused their attention on functional response properties of these gray matter networks and neglected the vital role of white matter connections in establishing such networks and t...
Through learning and practice, we can acquire numerous skills, ranging from the simple (whistling) to the complex (memorizing operettas in a foreign language). It has been proposed that complex learning requires a network of brain regions that interact with one another via white matter pathways. One candidate white matter pathway, the uncinate fasc...
The serendipitous discovery of mirror neurons in cognitive neuroscience has recently revived interest in the old philosophical ‘problem of other minds’. The remarkable thing about the mirror neurons is that they fire not only when an individual is performing an action, but also when that individual passively observes a similar action performed by a...
There is a growing consensus that social cognition and behavior emerge from interactions across distributed regions of the 'social brain'. Social neuroscience has traditionally focused its attention on functional response properties of these gray matter networks and neglected the vital role of white matter (WM) connections in establishing such netw...
Direct eye contact is a powerful social cue to regulate interpersonal interactions. Previous behavioral studies showed a link between eye contact and motor mimicry, indicating that the automatic mimicry of observed hand movements is significantly enhanced when direct eye contact exists between the observer and the observed model. In the present stu...
Mimicry involves unconsciously imitating the actions of others and is a powerful and ubiquitous behavior in social interactions. There has been a long debate over whether mimicry is abnormal in people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) and what the causes of any differences might be. Wang and Hamilton’s (2012) social top-down response modulation...
Encoding the internal features of unfamiliar faces poses a perceptual challenge that occasionally results in face recognition errors. Extensive experience with faces framed by a headscarf may, however, enhance perceivers’ ability to process internal facial information. To examine this claim empirically, participants in the United Arab Emirates and...
The neural and cognitive mechanisms by which primed constructs can impact on social behavior are poorly understood. In the
present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how scrambled sentence priming can impact on
mimicry behavior. Sentences involving pro/antisocial events from a first/third-person point of view wer...
Eye gaze is a powerful signal, which exerts a mixture of arousal, attentional, and social effects on the observer. We recently found a behavioural interaction between eye contact and mimicry where direct gaze rapidly enhanced mimicry of hand movements ). Here, we report two detailed investigations of this effect. In Experiment 1, we compared the ef...
People have a tendency to unconsciously mimic other's actions. This mimicry has been regarded as a prosocial response which increases social affiliation. Previous research on social priming of mimicry demonstrated an assimilative relationship between mimicry and prosociality of the primed construct: prosocial primes elicit stronger mimicry whereas...
One remarkable feature of social interactions is spontaneous mimicry. People have a tendency to unconsciously imitate other’s behaviours. This mimicry increases liking and affiliation between individuals and plays an important role in social cognition. Though mimicry is not normally consciously controlled, past research suggests that people mimic d...
Mimicry refers to the unconscious imitation of other people’s behavior. It facilitates social
interaction and plays a key role in one’s cognitive and social development. Converging evidences in
cognitive neuroscience reveal that the neural mechanism of mimicry is based on mirror neuron system.
Neuropsychological research suggests that clinical mimi...
The mirror neuron system (MNS) was first discovered in non-human primates; these neurons fire when a monkey performs an action or observes another monkey (or even some people) performing that same action. Recent findings have suggested that neural rehabilitation might be achieved through the activation of the MNS in patients after stroke. We propos...