Research:
The human brain develops in social contexts. The cognitive functions of the brain are greatly influenced by the interaction between an individual and the environment. The Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory investigates whether and how social interaction and shared knowledge modulate human brain functions using varieties of neuroimaging methods including high density event related brain potentials (ERPs), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We study cultural and social effects on the neural mechanism underlying low- and high-level cognitive brain functions. For example, we investigate whether perceptual processing (such as global/local processing of hierarchically organized visual stimuli) and spatial attention are modulated by cultural priming. We also investigate neural substrates underlying processing of social information. Specifically, we study how human brains perceive emotion, intention, and belief by observing others' behaviors in complex visual scenes, how the brain represents the self, how cultures influence neural substrates of self representation, and how cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating processes of social signals develop with age. Our research is conducted on both healthy adults and patients with brain lesions.
Our research projects include:
- Bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of empathy for pain;
- Cultural influence on self-recognition and self-representation;
- Domain general and domain specific neural mechanisms of theory-of-mind;
- Cultural influence on neural mechanisms of causal attribution.
Research Funding:
- Interaction between perceptual grouping and attention (The Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, 2002CCA01000, 2002-2005)
- Cognitive psychology: Study of visual perception and attention (National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC 30225026, 2003-2006)
- Effects of attention on motor learning and memory (National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC 30328016, 2004-2006)
- Cognitive and neural mechanisms of mental and causal attribution (National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC 30630025, 2007-2010)
- Neural mechanism of attentional modulation of perceptual grouping – A molet wavelet transform based analysis (National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC 30500156, 2006-2009)