Dr. Wang obtained his Ph.D. degree in Psychology at the University of Nottingham in 2012, and continued his postdoctoral training at New York University and Temple University from 2013 to 2019.

Dr. Yin Wang is currently the director of Multimodal Social Neuroscience (MSN) Lab and Principle Investigator in State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University. He is interested in the cognitive and neural processes underlying social cognition and social behavior (e.g. imitation, mind-reading, face processing, moral cognition, social decision making). He takes an integrative, multi-method approach, combining behavioral paradigms (motion capture, eye-tracking, psychophysiology), online survey, multimodal brain-imaging (fMRI, diffusion imaging), network neuroscience, and computational modeling techniques. His research has been published on high-profile journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Neuroscience.

The Wang lab aims to uncover the cognitive and brain mechanisms which allow us to interact with our social world, and also to understand how these mechanisms are compromised in people with social difficulties (both clinical and non-clinical). The lab always adopts a Gestalt mindset to study social cognition. Instead of studying single social process in isolation (i.e. reductionism), we believe most social processes are interdependent and should be investigated together in a more naturalistic and holistic way. At the brain level, we believe the research of functional specialization of single brain region is important but we should also pay more attention to the functional integration between multiple social brain areas and study social disorders at the network level.


The lab is currently studying the following questions: (1) How social and non-social processes work together during naturalistic social interaction, and how social brain networks interact with other domain-general networks? (2) What brain features determine the individual variation of interpersonal social skills? (3) How complex social knowledge is acquired, represented, stored in the brain and how does social knowledge impact our interpersonal behavior? (4) Online Experiment. For more information, please check Dr. Wang’s google scholar page (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VGkAqM8AAAAJ&hl=en)

1. Metoki, A., Wang, Y., & Olson, I.R. (2021) The social cerebellum: a large-scale investigation of functional and structural specificity and connectivity. Cerebral Cortex. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab260

2. Wang, Y., Metoki, A., Xia, Y., Zang, Y., He, Y., & Olson, I.R. (2021) A large-scale structural and functional connectome of social mentalizing. NeuroImage, 236:118115

3. Asadi, N., Wang, Y., Olson, I.R. & Obradovic, Z. (2020) A heuristic information cluster search approach for precise functional brain mapping. Human Brain Mapping, 41:2263–2280

4. Wang, Y., Metoki, A., Smith, D.V., Medaglia, J.D., Zang, Y., Benear, S., Popal, H., Lin, Y., & Olson, I.R. (2020). Multimodal mapping of the face connectome. Nature Human Behaviour, 4:397-411.

5. Popal, H., Wang, Y., & Olson, I.R. (2019). A guide to representational similarity analysis for social neuroscience. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,14(11):1243-1253.

6. Wang, Y., Schubert, T.W., & Quadflieg, S. (2019). Behavioral and neural evidence for an evaluative bias against other people’s mundane interracial encounters. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 14(12):1329-1339.

7. Wang, Y., Metoki, A., Alm, K.H., Olson, I.R. (2018). White matter pathways and social cognition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 90: 350-370.

8. Wang, Y., Olson, I.R. (2018). The original social network: white matter and social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(6): 504-516.

9. Metoki, A., Alm, K.H., Wang, Y., Ngo, C.T., & Olson, I.R. (2017). Never forget a name: white matter connectivity predicts person memory. Brain Structure and Function. 222:4187-4201.

10. Wang, Y., Collins, J. A., Koski, J., Nugiel, T., Metoki, A., Olson, I.R. (2017). A dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 114(16): E3305–E3314.

11. Prinsen, J., Bernaerts, S., Wang, Y., de Beukelaar, T.T., Cuypers, K., Swinnen, S.P., & Alaerts, K. (2017). Direct eye contact enhances mirroring of others' movements: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study. Neuropsychologia, 95:111-118.

12. Forbes, P., Wang, Y., & Hamilton, A. (2016). STORMy Interactions: gaze and the modulation of mimicry in adults on the autism spectrum. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24:529-535.

13. Wang, Y., & Quadflieg, S. (2015). In our own image? Emotional and neural processing differences when observing human-human versus human-robot interactions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10 (11): 1515-1524.

14. Wang, Y., Thomas, J., Weissgerber, S. C., Kazemini, S., Ul-Haq, I., & Quadflieg, S. (2015). The headscarf effect re-visited: further evidence for a culture-based internal face processing advantage. Perception, 44(3):328–336.

15. Wang, Y., & Hamilton, A. (2015). Anterior medial prefrontal cortex implements social priming of mimicry. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(4):486-493.

16. Wang, Y., & Hamilton, A. (2014). Why does gaze enhance mimicry? Placing gaze-mimicry effects in relation to other gaze phenomena. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(4):747-762.

17. Wang, Y., & Hamilton, A. (2013). Understanding the role of the ‘self’ in the social priming of mimicry. PLoS One. 8(4):e60249.

18. Wang, Y., & Hamilton, A. (2012). Social top-down response modulation (STORM)—a model of the control of mimicry in social interaction. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6:153.

19. Wang, Y., Ramsey, R., & Hamilton, A. (2011). The control of mimicry by eye contact is mediated by medial prefrontal cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(33): 12001-12010.

20. Wang, Y., Newport, R., & Hamilton, A. (2011). Eye contact enhances mimicry of intransitive hand movements. Biology Letters, 7:7-10.